The Charles Parker Awards – named in honour of one of radio’s greatest documentary pioneers – have established an unparalleled reputation for excellence in radio and audio feature production by young people, and many of our winners have gone on to carve out successful professional careers in radio and audio production.
The five winning features are broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in their series New Storytellers.
The competition is now open for entries for the Charles Parker Prize 2027
Our awards seek to capture some of the timeless originality that Charles Parker brought to his programmes, and especially to his legendary music-based documentation of working men’s and women’s lives, the Radio Ballads, such as The Ballad of John Axon and Singing the Fishing.
So we’re looking for programmes that innovatively capture the spirit of ordinary lives, their voices and their tunes, reinvented for the digital, multiplatform age. Your entry will have a sparklingly original idea, use the medium of radio feature to explore it to the full with humanity and imagination and, of course, make for a riveting audio presentation with storytelling at its heart.
A shortlist of entries will be selected by a judging panel of radio producers and critics chaired by the BBC’s former Creative Director, Simon Elmes; to find the entrants adjudged to have most successfully used the radio feature medium. The judging panel will also select one overall winner – the Charles Parker Prize Gold Winner.
The final decision on which five features will be selected for broadcast will be made by BBC Radio 4’s Commissioning Editor, Hugh Levinson:-
”The New Storytellers prize gives BBC Radio 4 and its listeners an opportunity to hear from vibrant, imaginative and talented producers with fresh takes on the world around us – while confirming our belief in the immersive power of documentary audio and reassuring us that it has a bright future.”
Hugh Levinson – Commissioning Editor, BBC Radio 4
Each winning student producer will then be invited to work alongside a mentor drawn from some of the very best feature-makers working in radio to review their features for broadcast – each winning will then be invited to mix their programme in the professional studio with a highly respected studio engineer.
The competition opens for Entries in w/c Monday 9th November 2026 and the final deadline will be 23:59 on Monday 8th March 2027.
A shortlist of features will be announced at the end of March 2027 and these nominees will be invited to the award ceremony, which will take place as an integral part of the annual Charles Parker Day, an event which celebrates the audio feature – past, present and future, which will take place at Birmingham City University on Friday 23rd April 2027.
The Gold Award winner and four other winning features will be commissioned by the BBC through the independent radio production company Soundscape Productions, co-ordinators of the Charles Parker Prize since 2010, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 during the summer.
You can submit your feature by clicking on Enter Now below. BUT FIRST…
READ the Terms and Conditions of Entry HERE
Still unsure about what you can enter? – then check out the FAQs HERE
Listen to Last year’s winners HERE
READ Simon Elmes, the Chair of the Judges, thoughts on what we are ideally listening out for:-
A BOLT OF (AUDIO) LIGHTNING
I have to confess, I love a good thunderstorm. All that flashing and rumbling, the thrill of the approaching downpour from a silent flickering horizon through to crack-of-doom thunderclaps directly overhead. And it’s a bit the same with a really terrific piece of audio feature-making: the whizz-bangs of an exciting story, the jeopardy of how it will all turn out, the spectacular and surprising blasts of sound or music.
A great feature knocks me for six.
And that’s what I and my fellow judges are always…. Read more