From Our Soundbooth | August 28, 2020

Arlie Adlington’s “Climb When Ready” was selected by 2020 Miller Audio Prize Guest Judge Alex Sujong Laughlin as the winner of this year’s Miller Audio Prize in Audio Documentary. We’re so excited to feature Adlington’s winning submission in its entirety below.

Arlie Adlington is an audio producer based in London. He has worked on documentaries and podcasts for people like BBC Sounds,VICE, Tate, BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio4, Scottee and The Dig. He says, “I’m especially passionate about making queer radio, working with young people and trying to help the audio industry become more diverse and accessible to everyone. A couple of my favourite projects have been co-producing the podcast series ‘NB’ (which aimed to ‘dismantle the gender binary, one big question at a time’), and making podcasts with 16-20 year olds from Brent as part of the London Borough of Culture programme for 2020.”

Here is Adlington’s winning submission, “Climb When Ready”:

Artist Statement

This piece is about climbing and being trans, and how I think those two things go together in a unique and special way. It features my friends Cass Adair and Martha Bennett.

When I made this, I’d been thinking a lot about how stories about trans people – when they’re made by people who aren’t trans themselves – are often very reductive, and sometimes quite objectifying. I think when trans people talk about our lives in our own words, what we have to say is usually much more interesting, and not necessarily what cis people are expecting us to say. So I wanted to make a piece about some stuff that had been on my mind at the time, so there’d be a tiny bit more trans radio in the world.

The piece first aired on the “Sports” episode of Short Cuts, on BBC Radio 4 in November 2019.