Show Menu

Dear Collegues

A total of 36 feature reports are nominated for the True Story Award 2024. The topics of the texts published in 2022/2023 reflect current world events in a wide variety. The nominees were chosen from 974 submissions from 101 countries.
The 36 nominees coming from 24 different countries will be invited to the True Story Festival in Bern from May 24-26, 2024 where their work will be presented to the public at individual events in the city centre of the Swiss capital.

During the festival, the main jury, representing five continents - including Nuruddin Farah from South Africa, China's Xiaolu Guo and American Jon Lee Anderson - will select the three winning texts, which will be announced at the award's ceremony on May 24.

We congratulate our colleagues on their nomination and look forward to welcoming them in Bern!

Daniel Puntas Bernet
Initiator True Story Award

942 Submissions from 101 Countries for 2024

The fourth edition of the True Story Awards attracted 942 texts from 101 countries, written in 18 different languages.

The 36 members of the jury read them, assessing relevance, research intensity, text design, journalistic truthfulness and impact. A total of 99 texts made it onto a shortlist, which we are publishing here.

The quality was extremely high in many of the categories, making the final selection a tough struggle for the individual jurors. Moreover the quality of the investigative work in other regions of the world in particular has increased significantly compared to previous years. In addition to global events such as war, religious conflicts, environmental offences and economic crime, many personal stories stand out in 2023, which recount major events on a human scale.

The three texts nominated for each of the twelve world regions/language areas will be announced mid-January. Their authors will be invited to the Award Ceremony on 24 May, and the following True Story Festival, 25/26 May 2024 in Bern, Switzerland.

Call for Entries for the 2024 True Story Award

With this message we're sending out the call for entries for the 2024 True Story Award. Texts from all over the world and in ten different languages can be submitted. Once again, this truly global Award is looking for the best stories from around the world that illuminate local events from a variety of perspectives. 

Click here for the call for entries and the conditions.

The call for entries will run until 5 November 2023 and texts published between 1 September 2022 and 30 September 2023 will be accepted. Compared to previous years, editorial offices can now also submit the best texts from their publications. In the categories «Europe», «World I» and «World II», texts in all other languages - together with a summary in English - are also accepted. The jury, consisting of 36 renowned experts from journalism, will then read and evaluate all texts. From these, three authors from each of the 12 categories will be nominated for the True Story Award 2024. They will receive an invitation to the True Story Festival in Bern at the end of May. The underlying core of the award is the gathering of journalists from all over the world and the exchange with audience in Bern. On site, the 7-member main jury, consisting of representatives from all five continents, will select the three winning texts.

We look forward to receiving your submissions! Join us in this global initiative for transparency and media freedom.

Three new Jury Members

The True Story Award jury is getting three renowned new members: In the category «English» US-American Ken Armstrong and British-Australian Caroline Lees; in the category «German» Austrian Antonia Rados.

Ken Armstrong is a reporter at ProPublica, where he specializes in longform narratives with an investigative base. He has won Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting and explanatory reporting, and shared in two staff Pulitzers for breaking news. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post and The Paris Review. A graduate of Purdue University, Armstrong has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and the McGraw professor of writing at Princeton.

Caroline Lees has worked as a reporter and editor on national newspapers for more than 30 years, including time as the South Asia correspondent for the Sunday Times. She has also reported from Africa, where she covered the 1994 end of apartheid elections from Johannesburg. Caroline has worked as a research officer at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, supervising research projects for journalists from all over the world.

Antonia Rados has been working as a crisis and war reporter for various German media since 1990. She was the only German-speaking journalist to report on the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. She has done several reports in the trouble spots Afghanistan, Iran or Egypt. Rados is the author of several non-fiction books. Twice she was awarded the German Television Prize for reports from Iraq and Yemen, and nominated for an Emmy in America for a report from Somalia.

The three new jurors replace their predecessors Jacqui Banaszynski, Michela Wrong and Ingrid Thurnher, whom we would like to take this opportunity to thank for their dedicated work since the beginning in 2019.

Award Ceremony
23 June 2023

Tonight the winners of the third True Story Awards were announced in Bern. In the presence of 200 guests, Mascha Santschi presented this year’s 12 finalists from all corners of the globe. Nicola Steiner, representing the main international jury, presented the global journalism award to the three winners, after which actors from the city’s theatre read the winning texts to the audience.

The winner of the main prize of CHF 25'000 is Marzio G. Mian from Italy. His reportage Hazard to the northeast appeared in Internazionale. The text tells of the first floating nuclear platform of our time, located in the northeast of Russia, on the coast of Siberia, in the port of the city of Pevek. A contemporary Chernobyl on ice, built in one of the most politically, economically and ecologically unstable regions in the world. Mian focuses on a threat that affects us all but that has remained hidden until now. A catastrophe that is not happening but that could happen at any time. A story that reads like science fiction but that could hardly be more real.

The second prize of CHF15'000 goes to Juan José Martínez d’Aubuisson from El Salvador for his text How the MS13 became lords of the trash dump in Honduras, published in Insight Crime. With vivid scenes in a huge mafia-run trash dump in Honduras and testimony from crime bosses in a maximum-security prison, Martínez d’Aubuisson has created a remarkable journalistic document that reveals links between the Honduran state and its underworld. It also warns how state indifference, popular marginalisation, poverty and political opportunism are breeding grounds for the collapse of democracies.

The third prize of CHF 10'000 was won by American journalist Katia Patin for her reportage Poland’s Ministry of Memory spins the Holocaust, published in Coda Story. The text is a chilling account of the struggle against a state-sponsored propaganda machine that seeks to rewrite an ugly chapter of Poland’s past and erase memory from the collective mind. It powerfully underscores the spectre of this history, which is set in Poland but has unmistakable echoes of other regions as countries around the globe move towards a nationalist and often racist right.

The winners beat out nine other finalists present in Bern who, as well as all of the other 24 nominees, will each receive CHF 1'000 in prize money. In total, over 900 entries were submitted from 94 countries in 21 languages.

These 12 finalists will travel to Bern for the award ceremony

We are in the final phase of the 2023 True Story Award. Thirty-six stories out of more than 900 entries from 94 countries were nominated by preliminary juries for the respective language areas/world regions. Now the main jury has reduced the shortlist to 12 stories, one per language area/region. Those 12 nominees will travel to Bern for the True Story Festival, starting with an awards ceremony on Friday, June 23 at 8 pm where the three main winners will be announced. On Saturday, June 24, all nominees will present their work to the public at individual events in the city centre of Bern. You can find the whole festival programme here: www.truestoryfestival.org.

Read the texts of the the 12 finalists here…

 

36 texts nominated for the True Story Award 2023

The third edition of the True Story Awards once again attracted more than 900 texts from 95 countries. Members of the jury read them, assessing relevance, research intensity, text design, journalistic truthfulness and impact. A total of 94 texts made it onto a shortlist, which we publish here.

The contents of these reports reflect current world events. Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, the economic and social consequences of the Corona pandemic and the consequences of advancing climate change all feature, viewed from a range of geographical and cultural perspectives. Political protest, migration movements, state and individual violence, economic fraud and the oppression of minorities are other themes running through many of the submitted texts.

They not only paint a multi-layered picture of recent events, they offer the reader some unexpected insights. Perhaps surprisingly, many of the authors manage to discern moments of hope and confidence in crisis-ridden times. 

The three texts nominated for each of the twelve world regions/language areas are known by now as well. The award ceremony of the True Story Award 2023 will take place on 23 June 2023 in Bern.

Call for Submission
for the True Story Award 2023

Dear colleagues

With this message we’re sending out the call for entries for the 2023 True Story Award. Once again, we are looking for the best stories from around the world that illuminate global events from a variety of perspectives.

We have made a few adjustments to the process due to what we learned in the last several years, also during the long break caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.  But the most important aspects remain the same:

  • From 23.9. to 23.10.2022, texts can be submitted in 10 different languages and in 12 different categories.
  • Texts can be submitted that were published between September 1, 2020 and August 31, 2022.
  • Only one text can be submitted per participant.
  • The jury will select the three best texts per category from all submissions.
  • The 36 nominated texts will be rewarded with prize money of 1 000 Swiss francs each.
  • The main jury will select the three winning texts from all the nominees.
  • The three winners will be awarded 25 000 Swiss francs (1st prize), 15 000 Swiss francs (2nd prize) and 10 000 Swiss francs (3rd prize).
  • The award ceremony/announcement will take place in Bern on June 23, 2023.

The underlying core of the award is the gathering of journalists from all over the world and the exchange with audience in Bern. We are working to ensure that the Festival, which is connected to the award, will take place once again. The expected dates are June 22-26, 2023. Provided the festival takes place, one person per nominated text will be invited to Bern, Switzerland to take part (travel, accommodation, meals included).

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

 

Jacobo García from El País wins the second True Story Award

The main jury of the global journalism award, consisting of seven renowned experts from North and South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, awarded the first three places and four other published articles after a full-day meeting in the Bernese Oberland.

 

The winner of the main prize of CHF 30 000 is Jacobo García from Mexico for his same article The Murky Waters of the Caribbean, published in El País. 

The second prize of CHF 20 000 goes to the German journalist Nina Schick for her reportage Under the Cross, published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazine. 

The third prize of CHF 10 000 goes to the American journalist Sarah A. Topol for her reportage The Schoolteacher and the Genocide, published in the New York Times Magazine. 

 

Honorable Mentions 2020/21

Banafsheh Samgis (Iran), City of the Condemned
Yulia Vishnevetskaya and Misha Yashnov (Russia), The Elusive Star of Soviet Art Brut
Pablo de Llano (Spain), And Thus We Lost the Generation that Changed Spain
Xiaoqing An (China), The Ci Poem on the Burial of Fallen Flowers, the Glue Applicator, and the Love Letter

真实故事奖

2023年瑞士伯尔尼首届全球记者奖

Premio global de reportaje 2023 en Berna, Suiza

Prix international du Grand Reportage, Berne, 2023

सत्य कथा पुरस्कार

बर्न, स्विटज़रलैंड में प्रथम वैश्विक पत्रकार पुरस्कार 2023

Premio mondiale per Reporter del 2023 a Berna, Svizzera

トゥルー・ストーリー・アワード

世界初のグローバルなリポーター賞、2023年スイス、ベルンで開催

Prêmio global para repórteres 2023 em Berna, Suíça

Первая международная премия для репортёров 2023 в Берне, Швейцария

جائزة قصة حقيقية

أول جائزة عالمية للمراسلين الصحفيين 2023 في مدينة بيرن بسويسرا

جایزه‌ی داستان واقعی

اولین جایزه‌ی جهانی خبرنگاری 2023 در برن سویس

جائزة قصة حقيقية

أول جائزة عالمية للمراسلين الصحفيين 2023 في مدينة بيرن بسويسرا

جایزه‌ی داستان واقعی

اولین جایزه‌ی جهانی خبرنگاری 2023 در برن سویس