Raúl Sánchez

Raúl Sánchez was selected for the 2025 Shortlist with Segregated by the Wheel of Inequality in Spain: How Impoverished Neighbourhoods Become Hotspots for the Lower Educated.

Raúl Sánchez is head of the Data team at elDiario.es (Spain), where he has worked for over ten years. He specializes in reporting on inequality, taxation, migration, agriculture, the labor market, elections, and public health, using data analysis as a key tool. He has contributed to investigations such as Castellana Papers, on tax avoidance among Spain’s wealthiest families; Enslaved Land, on labor exploitation in industrial agriculture; Spain lives in flats, mapping the height of more than 12 million buildings; Giving Birth with a Scalpel, uncovering striking disparities in C-section rates across over 300 hospitals in Spain; Spain at flood-risk, identifying nearly two million homes in flood-prone areas; and The Wheel of Inequality, an investigation into the mechanisms that perpetuate poverty and limit opportunities for families with fewer resources. The work of the elDiario.es data team has been cited by national and international media and is considered a reference in data-driven reporting in Spain. Since 2015, he has focused on telling stories through data at elDiario.es.

Nicolas Pelham

Nicolas Pelham was selected for the 2025 Shortlist with Marwan Barghouti, the World’s Most Important Prisoner.

Nicolas Pelham is The Economist’s Middle East correspondent. He started work in Cairo as editor of the Middle East Times and since then has spent 30 years studying, travelling and writing in the region. He is the author of A New Muslim Order (2008), A History of the Middle East with Peter Mansfield (2012) and Holy Lands (2016) which explores the region’s pluralist past. Taking occasional breaks from journalism, he has worked as a Middle East analyst for the International Crisis Group, the United Nations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs. In 2017 he won the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Journalism.