Fahad Shah, the editor-in-chief of The Kashmir Walla, has been awarded the prestigious 25th Human Rights Press Awards (2021) in explanatory feature writing for his coverage of Delhi pogrom in February 2020.
His two freelance articles, published by US-based The Nation and VICE News, were a “showcase [of] courage and originality of journalistic storytelling about human rights in Asia”, the panel noted for winners.
Two other Kashmiri journalists — including Jalees Andrabi and Sajjad Hussain, both correspondents of Agence France Presse — were listed in the Merit of the awards for their work on Delhi pogrom and India’s Covid-19 lockdown, respectively.
The Human Rights Press Awards recognise top rights-related reporting from around Asia, with the goal of increasing respect for people’s basic rights and focusing attention on threats to those freedoms.
Shah has been writing for several international publication and was shortlisted by the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) for 2020’s prize for courage for the newspaper’s “important part in defending press freedom” as the police “regularly summoned for questioning … about his reports in order to intimidate and threaten him”.
His work has appeared in TIME, Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Guardian among other publications.
