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.
Elena Kostyuchenko
Elena Kostyuchenko was selected for the 2023 Shortlist with Mykolaiv.
Elena Kostyuchenko is a Russian independent journalist. For 17 years she was a special correspondent of Novaya Gazeta, till the newspaper was shut down by Russian authorities in April 2022. She reported on conflict, crime, and social issues. Kostyuchenko was among the first to write about the presence of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine. She covered the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the second day of the war. She is also the author of two collections, Unwanted on Probation and It’s Us Who Will Live Here. Her work was acknowledged with multiple awards including European Press Prize, the Gerd Bucerius Award-Free Press of Eastern Europe, and Paul Klebnikov Prize.