Sara Parker introduces a new generation of student features makers, all winners and finalists of the Charles Parker prize 2021 – set up in memory of her father.

Through the late 1950s and 60s, pioneering radio producer Charles Parker, along with folk icons Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, made ‘The Radio Ballads’ , an innovative series which brought a new landscape of radio storytelling – interweaving interview and actuality with MacColl and Seeger’s musical narrative.

Charles’ daughter Sara Parker, herself an award-winning radio producer, hears this year's very best features on themes ranging from gender and race, body image, an asylum seeker, a window cleaner and a secluded all-male swimming place on the outskirts of Oxford to an invisible army of cleaners battling Covid and a doctor who turns to his love of the violin for solace with the Gold winning feature remembering 40 years on, the New Cross fire which killed 13 black teenagers.

There are extracts from the winning features of: Magdalena Moursy, Hunter Charlton, Chantal Herbert, Isobel Howe and Emma Millen, as well as the five runners-up Stephen Bissett, Shelley Gates, Mariana Araújo Ramos Maia Gonçalves, Ben Tulloh and Kate White.

You can hear the five winners’ work in full in the series ‘New Storytellers’ on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.

Producer: Jay Sykes

Made for BBC Radio 4 Extra by Soundscape Productions. Show less