Kashmiri photojournalist Sanna Irshad Mattoo among 4 Indians honoured with Pulitzer Prize

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Desk,10-May; Slain photojournalist Danish Siddiqui is among four Indians honoured with the prestigious Pulitzer Prize 2022 in the feature photography category.Siddiqui and his colleagues Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo and Amit Dave from the Reuters news agency won the award, announced on Monday, for “images of COVID’s toll in India that balanced intimacy and devastation, while offering viewers a heightened sense of place”, according to The Pulitzer Prizes website.Their work was moved from the breaking news photography category by the judges.Siddiqui, 38, was on assignment in Afghanistan last year when he died. The award-winning journalist was killed in July last while covering clashes between Afghan troops and the Taliban in Spin Boldak district of Kandahar city.This is for the second time that Siddiqui has won the Pulitzer Prize. He was honoured with the prestigious award in 2018 as part of the Reuters team for their coverage of the Rohingya crisis. He had extensively covered the Afghanistan conflict, the Hong Kong protests and other major events in Asia, Middle East, and Europe.Sanna, who holds Master’s in Convergent Journalism from the Central University of Kashmir, has her work published in international media outlets including Al Jazeera, TIME and TRT World. She has also done a fellowship with the prestigious Magnum Foundation in 2021.Siddiqui graduated with a degree in Economics from Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. He had a degree in Mass Communication from the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia in 2007.He started his career as a television news correspondent, switched to photojournalism, and joined Reuters as an intern in 2010.Marcus Yam of the Los Angeles Times bagged the award in the Breaking News photography category “for raw and urgent images of the US departure from Afghanistan that capture the human cost of the historic change in the country”.Yam’s work was moved from Feature Photography by the jury.Win McNamee, Drew Angerer, Spencer Platt, Samuel Corum and Jon Cherry of Getty Images also won the award in the Breaking News photography category for their “comprehensive and consistently riveting photos of the attack on the US Capitol”.The Washington Post bagged the Pulitzer Prize in public service journalism for its coverage of the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. According to the award committee, the newspaper “compellingly told and vividly presented account of the assault on Washington on January 6, 2021, providing the public with a thorough and unflinching understanding of one of the nation’s darkest