Eighty-sixth Annual Overseas Press Club Awards Announced

President’s note from Ian Williams:
"Pleased to see our own David Andelman’s award, and also that the OPC went agains the Lemmings to inaugurate the Shireen Abu Akleh Award."

​NEW YORK, March 18, 2025 — Coverage of the war in Gaza commanded the competition in the 86th annual Overseas Press Club Awards. The New York Times emerged as the top winner with eight awards – four of those for coverage of Gaza. The paper was also recognized for its investigation into the Sinaloa Cartel’s fentanyl operations in Mexico, the story of a Russian military deserter, a probe of toxins from India’s green energy industry and a collaboration with The Fuller Project on brutal conditions for women in India’s sugar fields.

The awards will be presented at the annual OPC awards dinner in New York on April 17. Lynsey Addario, an American photojournalist for more than two decades, will receive the club’s President’s Award for her outstanding coverage of conflict, humanitarian crises and women’s issues around the Middle East and Africa.

Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times and an award-winning author, will deliver the keynote address.

“We are thrilled to congratulate this year’s winners and citation honorees,” said Scott Kraft, Overseas Press Club president and Editor at Large for the Los Angeles Times.

“The winning work this year reflects the best in international reporting, and it is a gift to all of us who hunger for a deeper understanding of the world today. This year's awards, selected from more than 400 entries, were among the most competitive in years. We salute the dedication, skill and courage of all those who do this important work.”

Nine of the OPC’s 22 awards recognize reporting and commentary on the Israel-Hamas war. The honored work covers a range of angles, including documentation of the civilian toll from Israeli military attacks, the evacuation of injured children from Gaza for emergency medical care, the challenges of covering the conflict under restrictions for international media and the war’s ripples across the Middle East. Two of the three photography awards center on Gaza, the Best Cartoons award honors a project by Amy Kurzweil of the Los Angeles Times illustrating the Israeli-Palestinian struggle for peace, and the Flora Lewis Award goes to a New York Times Opinion video contributed by a Syrian-American surgeon in Gaza.

Three awards honor reporting on drug wars in Latin America, two on the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, two on the war in Ukraine and others on coverage of Haiti, Ecuador, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Al Jazeera English, The New Yorker and The Washington Post each won two awards. Al Jazeera English won the David A. Andelman and Pamela Title Award for a Fault Lines program about a family fleeing violence in Ecuador and the Peter Jennings Award for reporting in Gaza. The New Yorker won the Danish Siddiqui Award for photographs from Syria and the Lowell Thomas Award for investigating U.S. war crimes in Iraq. The Washington Post won the Robert Spiers Benjamin Award for an investigation into the expanding power of criminal gangs in Latin America and the inaugural Shireen Abu Akleh Award for continuing coverage of conflict for its innovative reporting on Gaza.

The Continuing Coverage of Conflict Award was renamed in May 2024 to honor Abu Akleh, a prominent Palestinian-American journalist who was killed during an assignment in 2022.

Laura Boushnak and Nariman El-Mofty of The New York Times won the prestigious Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for photography requiring exceptional courage and enterprise. The duo documented the evacuation of injured children from Gaza. Samar Abu Elouf, also with the Times, won the Olivier Rebbot Award for portraits and interviews with evacuees from Gaza who fled to Qatar. Moises Saman of The New Yorker won the Danish Siddiqui Award for images of the aftermath of the fall of the Assad regime and evidence of atrocities inside its infamous detention facilities.

The OPC also awarded runner-up citations in 21 of the 22 categories. The Associated Press and Bloomberg News led with three citations each, followed by The New York Times, Reuters, CNN and FRONTLINE (PBS), each with two citations.

Marcus Mabry, senior vice president of digital editorial and programming for CNN Digital Worldwide and an OPC past president, will be the awards presenter at the April 17 dinner.

The OPC Awards judging process is led by John Daniszewski, former vice president and editor-at-large for standards of The Associated Press. The entries are reviewed by more than 100 judges from across the profession with deep experience in international journalism.

For a full list of award winners, see below. To see citation (runner-up) winners, click on this link. A list of all our awards judges is posted here. Biographies of those honored with a named award are listed here.