Courage Award Winners

Sevgul Uludag is an investigative reporter for Yeniduzen newspaper in Cyprus. Uludag lives in the northern part of divided Cyprus but through her reporting attempts to ease the segregation between the Greek and Turkish communities. In doing so, she has faced many obstacles, including death threats and violent attacks. But neither hate campaigns nor psychological terror keep Uludag from publishing her articles.

Death threats were common for Maria Jimena Duzan, who covered the Colombian drug trade for a Bogota daily. The threats turned real for crusading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was assassinated in Moscow in 2006. These are just two of 56 valiant women journalists who have received Courage Awards since the IWMF launched the program in 1990. Read their inspiring stories below. And consider nominating a worthy colleague or friend for a Courage Award.

A correspondent for CIMAC news agency and a feature writer for Dia Siete magazine, Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho has endured numerous death threats because of her work reporting on domestic violence, organized crime and pedophilia.

Ethiopian journalist and former publisher Serkalem Fasil was arrested in November 2005 and charged with treason and outrages against the constitution,...

In the midst of the war in Iraq, the women of McClatchy’s Baghdad bureau risked their lives just to get to work. Driven by the desire to report to the world about the situation in their country, they became the backbone of bureau.

Jill Carroll, a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor, was working in Baghdad as a freelance reporter for the Monitor when she was abducted on January 7, 2006. Carroll was kidnapped about 100 yards from the office of Adnan al-Dulaimi, a prominent Sunni politician. She had scheduled an interview with him but started to leave after an aide told her he was unavailable. Upon driving away, a large truck blocked the path. Armed men surrounded the car, and Carroll was shoved and kidnapped. After an 82-day ordeal, she was released March 30 and returned to the U.S. April 2

May Chidiac is one of the best known faces on Lebanese television. In September 2005, the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation journalist lost her left hand and left leg as a result of a bomb exploding under the driver’s seat of her car. After months of recovery, she resumed her broadcasting career at the LBC.

Gao Yu, a freelance journalist who lives in Beijing, has twice been jailed for her reporting. She continues to fight against censorship, expressing her belief in human rights and the value of democracy.

Anja Niedringhaus began working as a freelance photographer at age 17 while still in high school. In 1989, while a student at the Goerg-August University in Goettingen, Germany, she covered the collapse of the Berlin Wall for the German newspaper Goettinger Tageblatt.

Sumi Khan began working as a journalist in 1993 when she started freelancing for several national daily newspapers in Bangladesh. In 1999, she became ...

Shahla Sherkat is the editorial director of Zanan (Women) in Tehran. Sherkat founded the monthly magazine in 1991, after she was dismissed from her position as editorial director at the government-owned weekly magazine Zan-e Rouz (Today’s Woman). She was pushed off the staff, she says, because she protested the magazine’s coverage of women’s issues, which only appealed to conservative, religious women who fit an image set forth by the Iranian government.

Gwen Lister, 50, began working as a journalist in 1975 in Namibia, when it was a province of South Africa known as South-West Africa. After completing her degree at The University of Cape Town, Lister took a job at the Windhoek Advertiser. She soon left the paper when the South African government put pressure on the editor to sign a document stating that the Advertiser would cease to print positive articles about the South-West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), which opposed the government and its system of apartheid.

Mabel Rehnfeldt began her journalism career in 1983 at Sendero, the official newspaper of the Catholic Church in Paraguay. Sendero was the only independent newspaper published during the final years of General Alfredo Stroessner’s 35-year dictatorship. (Stroessner was overthrown in a 1989 coup and currently lives in exile in Brazil.)

Salima Tlemcani is the pen name of an Algerian journalist who began writing under this name in 1994, after receiving death threats from armed Islamic groups who did not like the way she reported on them. She has requested that she receive the IWMF Courage in Journalism Award under her pen name.

Anne Garrels, a foreign correspondent with National Public Radio in the United States, was one of only two American women journalists in Baghdad during the recent war. Her vivid reporting brought the reality of a country under bombardment to her listeners. At one point she was blown back into the elevator of the Palestine Hotel, where she was staying, when a nearby building was bombed from the air. At another, she watched as a cruise missile passed right in front of her window. When U.S. bombs fell on the hotel killing two journalists, she was only a few floors away.