Murdered Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia will be honoured posthumously at a London awards ceremony this week in acknowledgement of her “extraordinary dedication and courage”.
Caruana Galizia will be the first posthumous recipient of the Martin Adler Prize at the Rory Peck Awards, which honours freelances working in news and current affairs worldwide, on Thursday.
Sarah Ward-Lilley, chair of the Rory Peck Trust whose board of trustees oversee the prize, said Caruana Galizia had won “in recognition of her outstanding body of work as a freelance journalist reporting alone on Malta’s most important stories, and in acknowledgement of her extraordinary dedication and courage working under the most challenging of circumstances”.
Caruana Galizia was killed aged 53 on 16 October last year when a car bomb detonated as she drove away from her home in the town of Mosta, sending the vehicle’s wreckage into a nearby field.
She had faced death threats, attacks to her property, including attempted arson, arrests, libel suits and online abuse and trolling due to her investigative work looking at corruption in politics.
She wrote weekly columns for The Malta Independent and Independent on Sunday but primarily exposed abuse and corruption through her blog Running Commentary.
Her family and press freedom groups are continuing to call for a full public inquiry into her death.
Caruana Galizia’s award will be collected by her eldest son Matthew, himself a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
The Martin Adler Prize is awarded annually to a freelance who has told, or played a vital part in telling, a significant news story and is intended to raise awareness of the value of their work.
It was created in honour of Martin Adler, a Swedish freelance journalist, photographer and film-maker who was murdered in Somalia in 2006.
Picture: AP Photo/Jon Borg/File
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