The Kyiv Independent’s Editor-in-Chief Olga Rudenko received this year’s special prize of the Hanns-Joachim Friedrichs Award, recognizing excellence in journalism.
The prize “honors three Ukrainian female journalists, representing all those who carry out professional journalistic work in an extremely difficult, dangerous environment; who, with their knowledge of the country, its people, and its political connections, provide an indispensable basis for the efforts of foreign correspondents,” reads the announcement on the award’s website.
The other two winners are Ukrainska Pravda’s Editor-in-Chief Sevgil Musaieva and Nataliya Gumenyuk, CEO of the Public Interest Journalism Lab and co-founder of Hromadske.
The award was named in honor of German journalist Hans Joachim Friedrichs, who died in 1995. Since then, it has been presented annually to journalists who have achieved exceptional results in their work.
“The particular challenge of her (Olga’s) journalistic work is being a war correspondent in her own country. It is their home that is destroyed, their apartments in which they endure nights of bombing, their relatives, friends, and colleagues who fight and die at the front,” the announcement continues.
“Nevertheless, working independently and professionally and conducting reliable research is an outstanding achievement we would like to recognize.”
In December last year, Rudenko was announced as the winner of the Women of Europe award in the “Woman in Action” category.
Rudenko was also included in TIME’s 2022 list of Next Generation Leaders, the U.S. magazine’s special series celebrating young people from different fields and around the globe “who are working to build a better world.”
The Kyiv Independent news desk
