By IANS
New York : A Pakistan-born, Bangkok-based photojournalist has won the prestigious Pultizer prize for “Breaking News Photography”.
Adrees Latif of Reuters won the prize Monday for his dramatic photo of a Japanese videographer being attacked in Myanmar. The graphic photo shows the man, sprawled on the pavement, continuing to shoot with his camera after what turned out to be a fatal injury sustained in shooting that followed a street demonstration as troops attacked protesters.
Latif has a BA in journalism from the University of Houston. After working for Reuters in the US, he moved to Bangkok in 2003 where he covers news across Asia.
The Pulitzers are journalism’s highest awards and given annually in various categories by Columbia University. They are named after the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who died in 1911.
This year, The Washington Post won a record six Pulitzers, including for its coverage last year of the Virginia Tech massacre, in which a mentally ill student killed 32 people and committed suicide. A team of 11 reporters worked on the story.
In arts category, the main Pulitzer for fiction went to “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”, Dominican-American Junot Diaz’s first novel that captures the heartbreak and loneliness of the immigrant experience.