Maartje Bakker

Maartje Bakker was selected for the 2023 Shortlist with The long road to a home in Europe.

Maartje Bakker (Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 1985) studied Biology, with a minor in Journalism and in Spanish Language & Culture. In 2009, she started working as a professional journalist, mainly for the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. First, she worked at the politics desk, writing about migration, justice, education and politics in general. After that, she became a correspondent in Spain, Portugal and Morocco. Since 2021, she is back in The Netherlands and works at the science desk of De Volkskrant, looking at society from a scientific point of view. Her stories have been granted several awards, among which the international AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award. She likes most to work on international projects, and to tell the stories of people who are normally not getting a stage, like migrants or victims of climate change.

César Dezfuli

César Dezfuli was selected for the 2023 Shortlist with The long road to a home in Europe.

César Dezfuli was born in 1991 in Madrid, in a context of cultural mixture given his Spanish-Persian origins. Self-taught in photography and having learned his trade as a journalist in various newsrooms, he now works as a freelance photojournalist, focusing on humanitarian crises and international affairs. His assignments and personal projects have taken him to document different realities worldwide, covering the election in Kenya, Rwanda or Kosovo, attending the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, or to China, where he documented families which have flouted the country’s one -child policy. Since 2015, his focus is on the migrant crisis at the borders of Europe, with a special attention on the Central Mediterranean migratory route. His work has been published in international media such as Le Monde, The Guardian or Time Magazine, and recognized with several awards as the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize (UK). It has also been part of individual and collective exhibitions worldwide, as in the National Portrait Gallery (UK), the Museum of Sydney (Australia), or Visa Pour L ́Image (France).