Sophie Pinkham, professor of the practice in comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences, received the 2023 British Journalism Award for Travel Journalism for her feature “Inside the European forest that geopolitics has turned into a graveyard.” The piece investigates a refugee crisis in Poland’s primeval forest.

“I was excited to see that the award’s judges included a story about a migrant’s journey in the travel category,” Pinkham said, noting that travel writing is often considered a light genre, especially in magazine or newspaper journalism. “There’s no reason that travel writing should be the exclusive realm of those privileged enough to travel for pleasure or adventure. We live in a world where many people travel out of desperate necessity, risking their lives for the journey.”

Pinkham’s winning story, which appeared in The Economist’s 1843 Magazine in March 2023, follows migrants from Syria “wandering in a cold, wet purgatory” on the Polish border of the European Union after Belarus ferried them there as a political stunt. The same story has been shortlisted for the 2024 True Story Award.

The piece is “brilliant investigative journalism with a kick in the solar plexus,” judges said. “It took headlines, soundbites and government propaganda around immigration and turned it into a deeply human story that gets to the heart of the issue.”

Read the story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.