Barbara Matejčić

Barbara Matejčić won the 2026 Special Award with Killing for the photo.

Barbara Matejcic is an award-winning Croatian freelance journalist, non-fiction writer, researcher and audio producer focused on social issues and human rights in the Balkan region.

She writes for Croatian and international media, produces multimedia projects, and radio documentaries for Croatian Radiotelevision. Barbara collaborates with activists, artists, and scholars in various projects as well as with international organizations and institutions. She lectures Investigative journalism and Feature writing at the Journalism Studies in Zagreb. She won several awards, including Srđan Aleksić Award for the Courage and Excellence in Journalism in the Balkan region (2025), European Press Prize Special Award (2024) and Investigative Journalism for Europe Award (IJ4EU, 2024) with the journalistic team and ‘The Border Graves Investigation’, and was finalist of the Daphne Galizia Caruana Award (2025) and selected for the 2021 European Press Prize shortlist with ‘Sisters of Europe. The Croatian Journalists’ Association awarded her as the best radio journalist for her documentary about border deaths (2025) and the best print journalist in Croatia for her features about post-war societies in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (2014).

Anastasiia Platonova

Anastasiia Platonova was selected for the 2026 Shortlist with Lost generation: Russia’s mephedrone teen crisis.

I am a Russian investigative journalist, and I used to be based in Moscow before Russia started the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since January 2022 I joined the BBC Russian service as a journalist and left Russia for Lativa in March 2022. Throughout my career I focused on telling the stories of underreported communities (teenagers, women, local communities), trying to combine both — the investigative angle and the social issues that are rooted deeply in the Russian society. I did a number of investigations on drug trafficking, showing the devastating effect organized crime has on the society, especially on the most vulnerable groups When I left to exile in Lativa with my son, I had to reinvent the way I approach my contributors and tell the stories from inside the country that waged a horrible war on its neighbour. But I remained committed to unbiased and truly independent journalism.