Megha Rajagopalan, an Indian-origin journalist, along with two contributors, has won the Pulitzer Prize for innovative investigative reports that exposed a vast infrastructure of prisons and mass internment camps secretly built by China for detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims in its restive Xinjiang region.
Ms Rajagopalan from BuzzFeed News is among two Indian-origin journalists who won the US’s top journalism award on Friday.
Ms Rajagopalan’s Xinjiang series won the Pulitzer Prize in the International Reporting category.
Congratulations to @meghara, @alisonkilling and Christo Buschek of @BuzzFeedNews. #Pulitzer pic.twitter.com/oXKPxCAvn4
— The Pulitzer Prizes (@PulitzerPrizes) June 11, 2021
In 2017, not long after China began to detain thousands of Muslims in Xinjiang, Rajagopalan was the first to visit an internment camp – at a time when China denied that such places existed, BuzzFeed News said.
“I’m in complete shock, I did not expect this,” Ms Rajagopalan said over the phone from London.
She said she was deeply grateful to the teams of people who worked with her on this including her collaborators, Killing and Buschek, her editor Alex Campbell, BuzzFeed News” public relations team, and the organisations that funded their work, including the Pulitzer Center.
Tampa Bay Times” Neil Bedi won for local reporting. Neil Bedi along with Kathleen McGrory has been awarded the prize for the series exposing a Sheriff’s Office initiative that used computer modelling to identify people believed to be future crime suspects.
Pulitzer prizes are awarded yearly in twenty-one categories. In twenty of the categories, each winner receives a certificate and a USD 15,000 cash award. The winner in the public service category is awarded a gold medal.
(Press Trust of India)
