As the year comes to an end, we celebrate another success for Unbias the News, Hostwriter´s cross-border newsroom. This time our very own Multimedia Editor and one of the members of the Border Graves Investigation team, Gabriela Ramirez, and co-author Tina Xu received the 2024 Lorenzo Natali Prize for Feature Journalism from the European Commission for their article Widowed by Europe´s Borders
This prestigious award of the European Commission grants recognition of excellent journalism worldwide. The feature journalism category especially considers in-depth and engaging reporting that also emphasizes responses to the challenges posed.
The European Commissioner for International Partnerships, Jutta Urpilainen, awarded the prize acknowledging the article “Widowed by Europe´s Borders” as a “well crafted, powerful and deeply moving piece of journalism that informs the reader through compelling narratives, thorough research, diverse perspectives and strong visual elements.”
“No water, I think I’ll die, I love you.” This is the last text Sanooja, the widow of this story, received from her husband, who disappeared after a pushback into the dense forest that stretches between Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland. Read the award winning piece here.
This year the Natali Prize received over 1200 applications from 102 countries across the world. 56% of the applications were entered for the Feature Journalism Category.
Congratulations to the authors of this powerful piece of journalism, Gabriela Ramírez and Tina Xu for yet another recognition for their work. This piece was also one of the finalists for this year’s One World Media Award in the Print Award category.
Both of the authors participated in the special award ceremony in Brussels on November 26th, 2024.
Speaking to an audience of influential EU commissioners and stakeholders in EU politics, Ramirez used her speech to take aim at policies that lead to danger and death for migrants arriving at Europe’s borders as documented in the story:
“The better question is not why they come—but why we, in Europe, choose rejection over refuge. This is not just about them. These stories are about us. They are a mirror reflecting the policies we create and the values we truly hold as societies. They force us to confront an uncomfortable truth: Europe’s borders have become battlegrounds for survival, militarized zones designed to inflict death as deterrence, and the very institutions whose halls we are standing in now, that claim to champion human rights, are complicit in a system that dehumanizes people for seeking safety, opportunity, and dignity.”
gabriela Ramírez
Ramírez also emphasized that “…migration is not a crisis of numbers or logistics. It is a crisis of empathy. It is a crisis created by policy choices. And those choices are not abstract; they have real, devastating consequences”.
You can learn more about the award and watch the full ceremony here: Lorenzo Natali Prize 2024
The Border Graves Investigation
The Lorenzo Natali award marks another recognition for the Border Graves Investigation, a cross-border investigation by eight freelance journalists from across Europe in collaboration with Unbias the News, The Guardian and Süddeutsche Zeitung. The team verified 1,015 unmarked graves across 65 cemeteries representing individuals who attempted to enter the EU and were laid to rest without identification along European borders in Poland, Lithuania, Greece, Spain, Italy, Malta, France, and Croatia.
The investigation as a whole has received multiple awards and recognitions. For example, the Special Award by the European Press Prize back in June this year and the IJ4EU Impact Award last September.
These recognitions are a meaningful precedent for many more years of creating and supporting impactful journalism and human-centered migration reporting.
We thank our funders and supporters for helping us bring to light stories that matter. To help us continue to cross borders in 2025, join our network of supporters with a tax-deductible donation for German supporters of any size today.