Megha Rajagopalan won the Pulitzer Prize along with Alison Killing and Christo Buschek for a series highlighting the size of the detention of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, China.
Megha Rajagopalan wasn’t watching the Pulitzer announcement ceremony because she wasn’t expecting to win. Rajagopalan, the international correspondent for BuzzFeed News, need to know her series exposing China's Uighur Muslims detention camps won the Pulitzer Prize within the International Reporting category after editor-in-chief Mark Schoofs called her.
“I’m in complete shock, I didn't expect this,” Rajagopalan, who is predicated in London, said consistent with BuzzFeed.
Rajagopalan won the Pulitzer Prize with contributors Alison Killing, a licensed architect, and Christo Buschek, a programmer, for a series exposing the size of the internment of Uighur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang province. This was the primary Pulitzer for BuzzFeed News, a digital news publication founded in 2014.
“Am so grateful to our team, to @BuzzFeedNews, @alexcampbell & the organizations that supported us. Most of all I'm grateful to ex-detainees who told us what happened to them inside Xinjiang's camps. the general public owes much to their courage. Still far more work to be done,” Megha Rajagopalan also tweeted.
BuzzFeed said during a report that Rajagopalan, who speaks Tamil and Mandarin , was the primary reporter to go to an prison camp wont to hold Uighur Muslims within the restive Xinjiang province at a time - in 2017 - when China was denying their existence. She was shortly ejected from the country and therefore the Chinese government refused to renew her visa.
Ben Smith, the then BuzzFeed editor, recalled that episode during a tweet. Smith said that after the Chinese government refused to renew her visa, he and a senior editor at BuzzFeed met officialdom . “They said we were welcome to send literally the other reporter — just not Megha. Who exposed Uighur camps from the surface in, & just won a Pulitzer,” Smith, who now works with the ny Times, wrote.
Rajagopalan, however, continued reporting on the camps from London, along side Alison Killing, an architect who specialises in forensic analysis of architecture and satellite images of buildings, and Christo Buschek, a programmer who makes tools for data journalism.
She is one among the 2 Indian Americans to win the highest American award for journalism announced on Friday. Tampa Bay Times’ Neil Patel won the Pulitzer for local reporting with Kathleen McGrory. it had been for his or her investigative series on a Florida county police’s use of computer modeling to spot potential crime suspects, including children who either performed badly at college or were victims of abuse reception . Patel now works with ProPublica, a non-profit focussed on investigative news.
Rajagopalan, born to oldsters from India, was raised in Maryland near Washington DC and visited the University of Maryland. “I’m deeply grateful to them for his or her support,” Rajagopalan said of her parents. “Nobody in my family has ever worked in media, but they need always supported my career in journalism, and are my biggest cheerleaders since i used to be a student,” she added.
The multiple-award-winning journalist shared a screenshot of her conversation together with her father, which she said was an “understated Indian dad reaction.” Her father simply said, “Well Done”. Pulitzer Prizes’ official Twitter handle even retweeted the post.
Rajagopalan has been working for BuzzFeed News for nearly five years and her LinkedIn profile shows she was based in China and Thailand also as in Israel and therefore the Palestinian territories. Before that, she was a political correspondent for Reuters in China. “She has reported from 23 countries in Asia and therefore the Middle East on stories starting from the North Korean nuclear crisis to the social process in Afghanistan,” consistent with the profile.
Rajagopalan has also won the Human Rights Press Award in 2018 and a Mirror Award in 2019 for an investigation uncovering the links between Facebook and non secular violence in Sri Lanka . She was a Fulbright fellow in Beijing and a search fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington DC. She was selected as an Asia 21 Young Leader in 2019.
In her spare time, she volunteers as a career mentor for the Coalition for ladies in Journalism and Report For America.
