When the dust settled, we had 73 entries for the Sound Walk September Awards 2024. We again worked with a fantastic volunteer Online Jury, drawn from our community of now nearly 1900 walking artists, who committed considerable time to reviewing each of this year’s submissions.

The number of submissions, this year, is a decent increase over 2023, and it was also easy to notice, again, the increase in quality of the submitted works. It was difficult to accept the tiny margin by which several sound walks didn’t make the shortlist.

We’ve got a long shortlist, at 15 submissions. Two are out of competition, as they include work from our core team, and one is a wild card, selected because it received the most votes of the works not already on the shortlist. In other words, it’s the public’s choice.
So, 13 sound walks are competing for the SWS24 Awards.

The piece 30 Days of Walking is a repackaging of a collaborative work made by 26 artists during the first year of COVID, during SWS20. It includes work by are founders Babak, Andrew, and Geert, and is therefore not eligible to win.
Laura Khan Mitchison is becoming a regular, previously winning in both 2020 and 2022.
Public Retreat’s The Graveyard Digression spreads its net wide, publishing its material on Soundcloud, Echoes, and Placecloud, WLC’s own location-based podcasting platform.

Without further ado. Here is the SWS24 shortlist:

• 30 Days of Walking (26 artists) – out of competition
• A City Full of Stories (artistic direction by Jackie Walduck and Hazel Gould)
• All-American Ruins: Mrs. Dalby & the Gravekeeper of Hatteras Island (Blake Pfeil, US)
• Along These Lines (Anna Celeste Edmonds, UK)
• Historic Cafés Route (Babak Fakhamzadeh, Netherlands/Iran/Brazil) – out of competition
• Hulked (Jeremy Scott and Anna Braithwaite, UK)
• Only Glaciers Know (Yanran Bi)
• OS ANDARES (THE WALKS) (Marcos PTT, Spain)
• Shore Land (JeeYeun Lee)
• Soundwalking, Listening and Contested Histories (Joseph Young, UK) – public’s choice
• Tastes Like Home (Echo Chamber Audio)
• The Graveyard Digression (Public Retreat, Norway/Sweden/Denmark)
• The Living and Tender Flesh: Brompton Cemetery (Laura Khan Mitchison)
• The Natural History Museum: A guide of our gardens (Harriet Fink)
• Weeds are Community (lucia.harley8)

So what happens next?

The shortlist is now reviewed by the SWS Grand Jury, who will meet to discuss each of the pieces as well as deciding on the winner and honourable mention.

Concurrently, the creators of each of the shortlisted sound walks are invited to write an article about how they came to make their work, and these will be published, here on WLC, in the coming weeks.

The winner and honourable mention of the Sound Walk September Awards 2024 will be announced around the new year. For the second time, they will walk away with a cash prize. After last year, we have been able to double the prize money; 500 euros for the winner, 200 for the honourable mention.
What a time to be alive!

The height of the cash prize depends on the amount of financial support WLC receives from people like you. We need your support, and would love to push next year’s prize to 1000 euros for the winner.
Help us help you!

Submissions for SWS25 are open. What are you creating this year?