Success For Women Freelancers At Rory Peck Awards

The Rory Peck Awards 2018 celebrated the work of freelancers in news and current affairs globally in a ceremony hosted by Sky News's Alex Crawford and the BBC's Jeremy Bowen at London's BFI Southbank.

Among the award-winners were American freelancer Roopa Gogineni and Norwegian Deeyah Khan, while the Martin Adler Prize was given posthumously to Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. The News award went to Spanish video journalist Mikel Konate.

The Rory Peck Award for News Features went to Roopa Gogineni for The Rebel Puppeteers of Sudan, her unique film about the creator of a satirical puppet show sharing news of the ongoing conflict in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains. Broadcast by The New York Times, Roopa's film is praised by judges as "a wonderfully original piece … She allowed the story to be told through the protagonists. It takes a really great journalist to be able to pull that off."

The Sony Impact Award for Current Affairs was won by Deeyah Khan and Darin Prindle for White Right: Meeting the Enemy (Fuuse Films for ITV Exposure). Their film sees Muslim filmmaker Deeyah sit face-to-face with fascists, racists and proponents of the American 'alt-right' to get behind their violent ideology. Judges said: "The filmmakers put themselves in an extraordinary situation which challenged both the subject and them. They got under the skin of these characters in a way that no-one else has."

The Rory Peck Award for News, sponsored by Google, was presented to Mikel Konate for his Reuters footage following a Spanish NGO carry out an arduous, ten-hour rescue mission of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. Calling it "an astonishing piece of journalism". Judges said: "Although it is one snapshot in time, his images reveal so much about the situation right now in the Mediterranean Sea."

The Martin Adler Prize was awarded posthumously to Daphne Caruana Galizia, a freelance investigative journalist who, at just 53 years old, was killed by a car bomb near her home in Malta last October. This special prize honours a local freelancer who has made a significant contribution to newsgathering, either through a single story or body of work, but who is largely unrecognised by the international news media. Daphne is the first posthumous recipient of the Prize, which was collected by her son Matthew.