Context:
A team of four Indian photographers from Reuters news agency — slain photojournalist Danish Siddiqui, Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo and Amit Dave — have won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for their coverage of the Covid-19 crisis in India.
Relevance:
GS I- Personalities in News
Dimensions of the Article:
- About Pulitzer Prize
- Who was Joseph Pulitzer, after whom the awards are named?
- Indians who have previously won the Pulitzer
About Pulitzer Prize
- The Pulitzer Prize is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine and online journalism, literature, and musical composition in the United States.
- It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of American (Hungarian-born) Joseph Pulitzer who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher.
- It is Administered by Columbia University in New York City.
- Prizes are awarded yearly in 21 categories. The winner in the public service category of the journalism competition is awarded a gold medal.
Who was Joseph Pulitzer, after whom the awards are named?
- Born to a wealthy family of Magyar-Jewish origin in Mako, Hungary, in 1847, Joseph Pulitzer had a stint in the military before he built a reputation of being a “tireless journalist”.
- In the late 1860s he joined the German-language daily newspaper Westliche Post, and by 25 he had become a publisher.
- In 1978, he became the owner of St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
- Under him, the paper published several “investigative articles and editorials assailing government corruption, wealthy tax-dodgers, and gamblers”.
- In 1883, he also negotiated the purchase of The New York World, which was in financial straits, and elevated its circulation.
- In 1884, he was elected to the US House of Representatives from New York’s ninth district as a Democrat and entered office on March 4, 1885.
- During his tenure, he led a movement to place the newly gifted Statue of Liberty in New York City.
Indians who have previously won the Pulitzer
- A member of the Ghadar Party in America, Indian-American journalist Gobind Behari Lal, was the first from India to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1937.
- He won the award for reporting with four others, for their coverage of science at the tercentenary of Harvard University. A postgraduate from University of California, Berkeley, he also received the Padma Bhushan in 1969.
- In 2003, Mumbai-born Geeta Anand was part of the team at Wall Street Journal that won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on corporate corruption,
- In 2016, Indian-American Sanghamitra Kalita, then managing editor of Los Angeles Times, won the Pulitzer in the Breaking News Reporting category with her team for their coverage of the San Bernardino shooting in California in 2015 and the terror investigation that followed.
- In 2000, London-born Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladies.
- In 2020, Channi Anand, Mukhtar Khan and Dar Yasin of Associated Press won the Pulitzer in the Feature Photography category “for striking images captured during a communications blackout in Kashmir depicting life in the contested territory as India stripped it of its semi-autonomy,”
-Source: Indian Express
