Investigative reporters and a imprisoned Russian dissident. The Pulitzer Prize knows its laureates

The most awards this year were given for coverage of the Palestinian Hamas movement’s attack on Israel on October 7 last year and Israel’s subsequent operation in the Gaza Strip, news agencies said.

The New York Times and The Washington Post have each been awarded three Pulitzer Prizes in 2023 for work ranging from the Gaza war to gun violence, The Associated Press said, whose photojournalists were honored for their coverage of global migration to the U.S. .

Coverage of the Hamas attack on Israel and its aftermath resulted in two Pulitzers and a Special Citation. Britain’s The Times won for its text reporting, praised as “extensive and revealing”, while Reuters won for its images. Journalists covering the war in Gaza were awarded a special citation.

Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is currently serving a 25-year sentence in a maximum-security penal colony for criticizing Russia’s war against Ukraine, won one of the prestigious Pulitzer Prizes for his comments written behind bars for The Washington Post. It was reported by the media with reference to https://twitter.com/ccaryl/status/1787562755215552596 awarding of prizes. The award was given “for impassioned commentary written at great personal risk from a prison cell”, they said.

Kara-Murza himself could not comment on the awarding of the award due to his imprisonment in a penal colony in Omsk, Siberia. His wife, Yevgenia, who lives with her children in American exile, thanked the editors of The Washington Post for the fact that her husband’s voice is heard, not forgotten, and his vision of a democratic Russia is not forgotten either. She recalled that her husband spent months in solitary confinement as a punishment, the AP reported. The Russian Embassy in Washington has not yet responded to a request for comment.

According to the media, the 42-year-old Kara-Murza is in poor health mainly due to two poisonings in 2015 and 2017. The investigative project Bellingcat previously reported that agents of the Russian FSB secret service, the successor to the Soviet KGB secret police, tried to poison the politician twice.

The Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in a total of 15 journalistic categories, as well as eight artistic categories focused on books, music and theater. The winner of the public service category receives a gold medal, all other winners receive 15 thousand dollars (about 646 thousand crowns).

The Pulitzer Prizes are awarded by Columbia University in New York and are considered the most prestigious American journalism awards. They are named after the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who died in 1911. The awards have been given since 1917. The jury announces winners in 15 journalistic categories, but awards the gold medal in only one, and that is for public service. Last year, the AP team won the main prize for reporting from the besieged Mariupol, Ukraine.