Andrés Mourenza

Andrés Mourenza  was selected for the 2026 Shortlist with Scrap Wars: How child labour and conflict feed Turkey steel boom.

Andrés Mourenza (A Coruña, 1984) is a Spanish journalist based in Istanbul, Turkey, since 2005. He currently works for the Spanish daily EL PAÍS and other Spanish media outlets. Throughout his career, Mourenza has reported from Greece, Cyprus, Syria, Iraq and the Caucasus, covering a wide range of topics, from armed conflicts and political crises to economic policy and migration.

His investigative reporting has been shortlisted for the Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize (“The Bankers of Irregular Migration”), the Premio Gabriel García Márquez, and the Global Shining Light Award (“Turkey’s EU-Funded Deportation Machine”). He received an honorable mention in the Trace Prize for Investigative Reporting (“The Bankers…”) and was part of the EL PAÍS team that won the Investigative Journalism for Europe Impact Award in 2023 (“Xinjiang Police Files”).

In 2020, Mourenza published the book Sínora, which examines the history of the Greek–Turkish border, one of the main gateways for migrants and asylum seekers attempting to enter the European Union. A year earlier, together with his colleague Ilya U. Topper, he published La democracia es un tranvía, about President Erdoğan’s rise to power and the evolution of Turkey in recent decades.

Sofia Cherici

Sofia Cherici was selected for the 2026 Shortlist with Scrap Wars: How child labour and conflict feed Turkey steel boom.

Sofia Cherici is an investigative journalist based in Istanbul, with a track record of leading ambitious cross-border investigations across Europe and the Middle East. Her work focuses on the intersection of business malpractice, tainted supply chains, the environment, conflict and state accountability. Her reporting has been supported by international grants from Journalismfund Europe, CIJI and IJ4EU.

She specialises in long-form and multimedia reporting, combining fieldwork with public records, financial registries, FOI requests, data analysis, and OSINT. Her recent projects include coordinating Scrap Wars, a cross-border investigation tracing conflict-linked steel scrap from Syria into Turkey’s steel industry — ultimately contributing to Lebanon’s ban on scrap metal imports from Syria — and reporting on Biomass: The Green Mirage, an investigation into a Czech billionaire’s scheme to exploit loopholes in Europe’s green-subsidy regime. Her work has appeared in outlets including The New Arab, La Repubblica, Follow the Money, EL PAÍS, New Lines Magazine and IrpiMedia.