It was not in Kiev or Gaza, from where he sometimes sent reports, nor even in Belgium, his country of origin, but in Vichy, the birthplace of Albert Londres, that Wilson Fache received , Monday November 27 in the early evening, the eighty-fifth prize of the same name, in the written press category.
The 31-year-old war reporter sees the jury, chaired by former France Télévisions journalist Hervé Brusini, recognize “a rare pen, a talent for evocation, an ability to take his audience into atmospheres…” : so many literary qualities identified in a selection of articles produced in Afghanistan and Ukraine that our colleague published in Release and in the Belgian daily economic, political, financial and cultural information The Echo (on Afghanistan and Ukraine), but also a monograph full of humanity of the Babelian bus station in Tel Aviv, published by the “indisciplinary” cultural magazine Movement.
“Generation Mosul”
“In each war, young journalists have their first field experience. It cannot be learned at school,” recalled in The worldat the start of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the reporter from what the profession calls the “Mosul generation”. With other young professionals, it was in Erbil, Iraq, that the Belgian truly learned war reporting, after a master’s degree in international journalism obtained in 2015 at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Social Communications in Brussels.
Training supplemented by crisis zone reporting courses taken at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma in New York, then a master’s degree in war studies obtained at King’s College London. He was quickly crowned with the Bayeux Prize for Young War Correspondents, awarded in 2019 for some of his reporting in the Gaza Strip.
The thirty-ninth prize in the audiovisual category goes to Hélène Lam Trong, for her report Daesh, the ghost childrenco-produced by Cinétévé and broadcast by France 5. The jury, made up of former recipients (director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, our colleague Annick Cojean, the 2022 winners, etc.), “welcomes this investigation which speaks of what is becoming an embarrassed silence, these hundreds of children that France lets grow up in prisons in Syria”.
“Difficult, brilliant work”
Aged 41, a graduate of Sciences Po Toulouse and the School of Advanced Studies in Information and Communication Sciences (Celsa), the journalist has also already seen the quality of her work recognized several times ( SCAM prize Draft of a dream 2022, Varenne prize 2006, Rotary prize for young journalist 2006).
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