Evgeniy Maloletka

Evgeniy Maloletka was selected for the 2023 Shortlist with ‘Why? Why? Why?’ Ukraine’s Mariupol descends into despair. 

Maloletka is a Ukrainian war photographer, journalist and filmmaker, who has been covering the war in Ukraine since 2014. He has also covered the Euromaidan Revolution, the protests in Belarus, the Nagorno-Karabakh war and the COVID-19 pandemic in Ukraine. He took the iconic photograph of a wounded pregnant woman carried out on a stretcher after a maternity hospital in Mariupol was bombed. The photograph was used by news organizations around the world. His work during the siege of Mariupol has been recognized with the Knight International Journalism Award, the Visa d’or News Award, the Prix Bayeux Calvados-Normandie and a George Polk Award for War Reporting, among others.   Maloletka and his colleague, Mstyslav Chernov, were the last international journalists in Mariupol when Russian troops attacked. Driving a van with windows blown out by explosions, snatching a bit of battery power where they can to file videos and photos, and checking in during rare moments when there was enough of a network signal, the two journalists were the world’s only eyes on a city that was my to the Russian attack on Ukraine. 

Cathrin Kahlweit

Cathrin Kahlweit was selected for the 2023 Shortlist with To Hell and Back. 

Cathrin Kahlweit was born in 1959 in Göttingen, Lower Saxony. She studied Russian and Political Science at the University of Oregon (USA), at the Universities of Tübingen and Göttingen (Germany) and at the Pushkin Institute (USSR) – and finished her MA in 1985.

After two years of further education at Henri-Nannen School of Journalism in Hamburg she worked freelance for TV-stations and magazines, before she joined the staff of Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), one of the biggest national daily papers in Germany. 

Kahlweit has been an editor, reporter and correspondent for SZ for more than 30 years now, covering mainly Central and Eastern Europe and foreign politics. She worked in Frankfurt and Berlin and, as a foreign correspondent, in Vienna and London, traveling and writing about Brexit and the UK for three years, and about Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary and Austria for more than ten years now.

Kahlweit has three grown up children and wrote six books – not only about politics.