Kerstin Kohlenberg

​​Kerstin Kohlenberg was selected for the 2026 Shortlist with Not again!

Kerstin Kohlenberg was born in Koblenz, Germany. After spending a year as an au pair in Paris, she studied sociology in Marburg, Berlin, and New York. She worked for ZDF-Television in New York and Berlin and completed a traineeship at Tagesspiegel. In 2004, Kohlenberg joined the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT, where she first served as deputy head of the feature section „Dossier“ and later moved to the newly established investigative department. From 2014 to 2021, she headed DIE ZEIT’s Washington bureau. Since returning to Berlin, she has been working as a reporter, primarily writing about the United States. Kerstin Kohlenberg has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Herbert Riehl-Heyse Prize, the Theodor Wolff Prize, the German Journalism Prize, and the Reporter Prize. For DIE ZEIT, she produced the successful seven-part America podcast “Die Patrioten” in 2022. In June 2024, her book about the USA, “Ein amerikanisches Versprechen,” was published by Klett-Cotta Tropen Verlag.

Filip Struhárik

Filip Struhárik was selected for the 2026 Shortlist with Unhappy, lonely, and unable to talk about it: Why men are losing friends.

Filip Struhárik is a reporter and editor for the Slovak newspaper Denník N. He mainly covers topics related to media, digital platforms, and artificial intelligence. From 2009 to 2014, he worked as an online news editor and project manager at SME.sk. He has received several Slovak awards for journalism. He collaborates with the international organization Reporters Without Borders. He is the author of the book Co je nového v médiách (What’s New in the Media).