The Ryszard Kapuściński Award on kapuscinski.info

Forest of Spirits

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Andrzej Dybczak has been travelling to Siberia for more than twenty years. He knows the local languages, understands the rhythms of life of the forest peoples, and is one of the very few Polish reporters who enter these worlds not as a tourist but as a long-term observer. Forest of Spirits is the latest — and perhaps deepest — instalment in his Siberian project.

The book immerses the reader in a reality where the boundary between the living and the dead, between human and animal, between the forest and the beyond, is fluid and uncertain. Dybczak describes the Evenki — a nomadic Siberian people for whom the taiga is not a geographical space but a living organism inhabited by spirits: ancestors, animals, plants, rivers. Shamanism is not folklore or exoticism here — it is a way of understanding the world and coping with its darkness.

This Is Not Miami

Wed, 01 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Fernanda Melchor, known above all as a novelist (including the award-winning Hurricane Season), returns in this collection of literary reportages to her home city of Veracruz — a port city on the Gulf of Mexico that for years was terrorised by drug cartels, particularly Los Zetas.

This Is Not Miami is a cycle of texts based on factual stories gathered by the author between 1990 and 2011. Melchor writes about killers, social outcasts, and people pushed to the margins — but instead of condemning, she forces the reader to try to understand what drives a person towards evil. Among the reportages are an account of an exorcism performed in the belief of diabolical possession, a story of merciless executions ordered by a cartel, accounts of women living in the shadow of violence, and portraits of officials and institutions entangled in corruption.

The Silence

Mon, 01 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Anna Goc is a journalist and reporter associated with Tygodnik Powszechny, who has spent years working on topics at the intersection of society, law, and identity. She entered the world of the Deaf gradually, over many years, learning Polish Sign Language, speaking with Deaf people, their families, educators, and activists. The Silence is the product of that long work — a reportage that opens a door into a reality entirely invisible to the hearing.

Potosí: The Mountain That Eats Men

Sun, 01 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Ander Izagirre is a Basque writer and reporter, author of several award-winning reportage books. His work addresses colonialism, poverty, global and local history. He came to Potosí not to stay briefly — not as a tourist with a notepad — but as someone who wanted to understand the city from the inside, through its people and their everyday lives. He spent many months there, descending into mines, living with miners’ families, and tracing the interwoven fates that together compose a portrait of a place unique in the world.

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

Thu, 20 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Jessica Bruder is an American journalist and reporter, a long-time contributor to The New York Times and Harper’s Magazine, known for her in-depth reportages on social phenomena hidden behind America’s official image. She stumbled upon the Nomadland story by chance — a woman living in a van in a shopping-mall car park became the starting point for three years of research, during which Bruder herself repeatedly got into a vehicle and set out alongside her subjects.

The Scab: Spain Scratches Its Wounds

Fri, 01 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Katarzyna Kobylarczyk is a Polish reporter and journalist who has spent years connected with Spain — a country that became the subject of her long-term work. She has published in Gazeta Wyborcza, Tygodnik Powszechny, and Dziennik Polski. The Scab is her most recognised book, winning the Ryszard Kapuściński Award in 2020. The author reached the families of Francoism’s victims, archaeologists and anthropologists conducting exhumations, lawyers fighting for judicial recognition of crimes, historians, and those who prefer to remain silent.

The House with Two Towers

Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Maciej Zaremba Bielawski was born in 1951 in Poznań. He grew up in a family that for years fed him an aristocratic legend — an ancestor was said to have fought at Grunwald, and a portrait of a Piast knight hung on the wall. When he was seventeen, as the antisemitic purges of March 1968 were under way, his mother said to him: “We are leaving. I am Jewish.” That was the first of many family secrets he would uncover over the following decades. Today he is one of Sweden’s most respected journalists and reporters, a long-time contributor to Dagens Nyheter.

Sendler: In Hiding

Tue, 01 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Anna Bikont is one of Poland’s most important investigative journalists and reporters, a long-time editor at Gazeta Wyborcza. She is known above all for her celebrated book The Crime and the Silence, devoted to the Jedwabne massacre and its troubled memory. In the case of Sendler she worked for years, reaching testimonies of witnesses, archival documents, letters, and memoirs of both rescued children and those involved in the conspiracy. The result is a biographical reportage whose goal is not glorification but the conscientious restoration of historical truth.

Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Rana Dasgupta is a British writer and essayist of Bengali descent, author of novels and essay collections. He lived in Delhi for more than a decade, observing at close range the transformations the city underwent after the liberalisation of the Indian economy in the early 1990s. This Delhi — wrenched from rural lethargy and hurled into the dizzying pace of globalisation — became the subject of his reportage book.

Capital: The Eruption of Delhi is a portrait of a metropolis in which new wealth and old poverty live side by side in a state of permanent tension. Dasgupta meets a wide cross-section of people: property and technology billionaires, children of former aristocrats, women’s rights activists, migrants from the countryside seeking work in the slums spreading around glass skyscrapers. Each conversation is a point of entry into a deeper layer — of history, memory, desire, and fear.

The Devil and a Bar of Chocolate

Sun, 01 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Paweł Reszka is one of the most recognisable Polish reporters of his generation. He is known above all for Płuczki (The Washers) — a harrowing book about people sifting the earth at former extermination camps in search of gold and valuables taken from murdered Jews. The Devil and a Bar of Chocolate appeared earlier, but reveals the same observational instinct and the same ability to enter places where other reporters do not reach or do not wish to go.

Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan

Fri, 01 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

William Dalrymple is a Scottish historian, traveller, and writer, one of the most respected Western authorities on South Asia and the Middle East. He lived for many years in Delhi, conducting archival research in Afghan, Indian, Pakistani, and Russian collections. His books — from In Xanadu to The Anarchy — combine historical erudition with a reporter’s temperament and the narrative instinct of a novelist.

Return of a King reconstructs the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839–1842 — one of the most catastrophic military defeats in British imperial history. Confident of easy victory, a British army invaded Afghanistan to install the puppet king Shah Shuja ul-Mulk on the throne. Three years later, of an expedition numbering more than fourteen thousand soldiers and civilians, just one man survived the retreat.

And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Still Stand

Thu, 01 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Elisabeth Åsbrink is a Swedish writer and journalist, recipient of numerous literary awards in Sweden and abroad. Her work is haunted by the Holocaust as seen from a Swedish perspective — from a country that escaped occupation, but whose neutrality and passivity in the face of the fate of European Jews is a subject long left unspoken. And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Still Stand is a reckoning with that history — and at the same time a personal story, since Åsbrink is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.

Amexica: War Along the Borderline

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Ed Vulliamy is a British investigative journalist and war reporter, known above all for his coverage of the siege of Sarajevo and the genocide in Bosnia. He worked for many years as a correspondent for The Guardian and The Observer. He arrived on the Mexican-American border in 2009, setting out on a journey from Tijuana to Matamoros — the entire length of the border, from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. The result was a reportage that changed the way the English-speaking world understands the drug war.

The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up

Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Liao Yiwu is a Chinese poet, prose writer, and musician who for many years was one of the most persecuted writers in the People’s Republic of China. Following poetry he wrote in connection with the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, he was imprisoned for four years. After his release he spent more than a decade conducting interviews with people pushed to the very bottom of the Chinese social ladder — those the communist system preferred to render invisible. In 2011 he fled to Germany. His books are banned in China.

The Unwomanly Face of War

Sun, 01 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian writer and reporter, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015. For decades she developed her own unmistakable method of documenting history: instead of chronicles and analysis — the human voice, spoken, interrupted, incomplete. Her “novels of voices” — as she calls them — are montages of hundreds of interviews creating a collective testimony to a time. She began work on The Unwomanly Face of War in 1978 and finished in 1983. The book was published in the USSR in 1985 and immediately sold two million copies — but in a censored version. The complete text, with all the passages the censors had ordered removed, appeared for the first time in 2004.

The Antelope's Strategy

Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Jean Hatzfeld is a French journalist and reporter who spent many years as a correspondent for Libération at the world’s most dangerous armed conflicts — in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Rwanda. His hallmark is the patient, years-long building of relationships with people touched by collective violence, and the ability to draw from them testimony that seemed impossible to articulate. For his Rwandan trilogy he received France’s Prix Médicis.

The Antelope’s Strategy closes a cycle of three books devoted to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which between half a million and a million Tutsi were murdered within the space of a few weeks. The first volume, Into the Quick of Life, gave voice to survivors from the Nyamata marshes; the second, Machete Season, portrayed the perpetrators — Hutu who personally took part in the killing. The third returns to the same villages some years after the genocide, when some of the convicted Hutu had returned from prison or exile in Congo to stand face to face with their former victims.