Danish Siddiqui and his colleagues from the Reuters news agency won the Pulitzer Prize for their well-appreciated work on “Images of COVID’s toll in India.” He worked alongside Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo, and Amit Dave.
It is a chance of honour for the country to have 4 Indians who have been given this prestigious honour, one of them being the Slain photojournalist Danish Siddiqui for his work in the feature photography category in the 2022 Pulitzer Prize.
Siddiqui and his colleagues from the Reuters news agency won the Pulitzer Prize for their well-appreciated work on “Images of COVID’s toll in India.” He worked alongside Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo, and Amit Dave. According to the Pulitzer Prize website,” Images of COVID’s toll in India that balances intimacy and devastation, while offering viewers a heightened sense of place.”
The image shows the ground surrounding a crimination site during a mass cremation that was performed for victims of the Coronavirus Disease in New Delhi, on April 22, 2021, when the Pandemic was at its peak and the lockdown was instated in most cities of the country.
He was on an assignment in Afghanistan during the time he got killed while covering a clash between Afghan security forces and Taliban forces near a border crossing with Pakistan in July of 2021.
This was Siddiqui’s second time winning the Pulitzer Prize for his work, he was honoured with the prestigious prize in 2018 as well as part of the Reuters team for their coverage of the Rohingya crisis. In his career, he had covered plenty of events that most people were afraid of or too scared to go and capture.
He extensively covered the Afghanistan conflict, the Hong Kong protests and various major events that happened in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.
The Pulitzer Prize was established by Joseph Pulitzer, who was a Hungarian- American journalist and newspaper publisher. He left money to Columbia University upon his death in 1911, a portion of the money left by him was used in the foundation of the school of journalism in 1912 and established the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1917.
The 19-member Pulitzer Board is composed of leading journalists and news executives from media outlets across the US, as well as five academics or persons in the arts. The dean of Columbia’s journalism school and the administrator of the prizes are non-voting members. The chair rotates annually to the most senior member or members.
