Freelance journalist Liz Cookman has been named as the winner of the first Irish Times Dave McKechnie Memorial Journalism Prize.
Ms Cookman has been based in Ukraine for the past 2½ years, living for spells in Kyiv, Dnipro and, in the period before it fell to Russian forces, Mariupol, while reporting on the ongoing war.
Previously, she was based in Turkey and Abu Dhabi, and in 2020 she reported on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Her work has appeared in the Guardian, the Economist and on Channel 4 News. She previously won the Amnesty media Gaby Rado New Journalist award for her work in Donbas and was shortlisted for the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for war correspondents.
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She receives a €3,000 prize for winning the competition.
The prize is named in honour of the late Dave McKechnie, deputy foreign editor of The Irish Times, who died unexpectedly in 2022, aged 45. Over the course of a career that started in football journalism, he reported from many countries including Colombia, Myanmar, Nigeria and Brazil.
Entrants were required to write an article in the “Letter from ...” format in which Dave excelled. Ms Cookman’s winning entry took the form of a Letter from Ukraine.
“The ‘Letter from ...’ format, familiar to readers of our World section, was the ideal showcase for Dave’s remarkable talent,” said Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, editor of The Irish Times. “His editing background gave him an intuitive feel for the mechanics of good writing, but he was a first-rate noticer, a brilliant stylist, serious without being solemn.
“The winning entries, selected from a large number of submissions, come at their stories not head-on but from an angle, often an unexpected one. Liz Cookman’s superb Letter from Ukraine is about the fortunes of her local nail salon in Kyiv, but her theme is the resilience of ordinary people in a country at war. It’s a fitting choice.”
Two entrants received runner-up awards: Ailbhe MacMahon, a freelance writer who has just returned from a period of travel overseas, for her “Letter from Varanasi”; and Sorcha Lanigan, from Cork, who studied in her home city as well as in London and Leiden. Her entry was a “Letter from Athlone”. Their pieces will be published next week.
The judging panel comprised Irish Times foreign editor Chris Dooley, education editor Carl O’Brien and Dave’s wife Lilian Dorst.
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