Team of Reuters Photo Journalists From India Wins Pulitzer Prize for Coronavirus Coverage

A team of Reuters photojournalists from India, including the late Danish Siddiqui, has won this year’s Pulitzer Prize in the feature photography category coverage of the coronavirus pandemic’s toll in India. Sharing the award with Siddiqui are Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo, and Amit Dave. 

Siddiqui, Reuters’ chief photographer in India, was killed on July 16 while on assignment in southern Afghanistan, after coming under fire by Taliban militiamen. Reporting Siddiqui’s death, the news agency cited an Afghan commander who said the 38-year-old photojournalist had been killed while covering fighting between Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters.

Pulitzer Prize Administrator Marjorie Miller told Reuters that the Reuters team won for “images of COVID’s toll in India that balanced intimacy and devastation.”

In a statement, Reuters editor-in-chief Alessandra Galloni said that the photographs “jolted” a world largely preoccupied with its own suffering to the scale of India’s outbreak. “To have Danish’s incredible work honored in this way is a tribute to the enduring mark he has left on the world of photojournalism.” Siddiqui was also part of the Reuters photography team to win the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for documenting the Rohingya refugee crisis.

For this year’s awards, journalists from Ukraine were recognized with a special citation. Jurors also recognized coverage of the January 6th attacks on the Capitol, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Surfside condominium collapse in Florida.

The awards were established in 1917 in the will of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who died in 1911. The awards began with four awards in journalism, four in letters and drama, one for education, and five for traveling scholarships. Today they typically honor 15 categories in media reporting, writing and photography plus seven awards in books, drama and music.