Shalini Nair
Shalini Nair, Senior Assistant Editor, The Indian Express, has won one of the top international journalism awards named after American reporter Kurt Schork. These are awarded by the Kurt Schork Memorial Fund which felicitates journalists under three categories — freelancers, local reporters and a new category added last year for fixers.
Announcing the winners, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which hosts the award ceremony in London, said that the Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism are to “honour some of the most courageous yet least recognised journalists around the world”.
Nair was awarded in the local reporter category for her work relating to gender-based violence, caste discrimination, and unequal development.
Her three entries were the Forgotten Soldiers of Swachh Bharat, about the policy blindness towards manual scavengers; on 80 per cent of Smart City funds being allocated for just 2.7 per cent of the already developed pockets of the city area; and about one of the three petitioners seeking criminalisation of marital rape in India.
Nair’s reports, the citation said, “were compelling, interesting and well reported. They tackled important but under-reported topics deftly and thoughtfully”.
This is the 17th edition of the awards in memory of Schork, who was killed in Sierra Leone while on an assignment for Reuters in 2000.