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Thursday, March 14, 2002
Contact: Alison R. McGaughey
news@knox.edu
309-341-7650
Barry Bearak, co-chief of The New York Times bureau in New Delhi, India, and a 1971 graduate of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, has received a prestigious 2001 George Polk Award, which recognizes superb reporting based on original investigation.
According to the prize announcement, Bearak won in the category of Foreign Reporting for "searing dispatches from Afghanistan that offered dramatic eyewitness reporting filled with humanizing detail."
Bearak has covered events in Islamabad, Karachi, and Lahore in Pakistan, including the nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan and the coup that brought army general Pervez Musharraf into office. Bearak has been co-chief of the bureau in New Delhi with his wife, Celia Dugger, since 1998. He had been writing about the struggle between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance long before the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
The 2001 George Polk Awards, announced in February 2002, were established by Long Island University in 1949 to memorialize a CBS correspondent who was killed while covering a civil war in Greece. Previous recipients have included Charles Kurault, Peter Jennings, Walter Cronkite, Christiane Amanpour, Ted Koppel, Edward R. Murrow, Morley Safer, Olivia Sacks, Nina Totenberg, and many others. Bearak was one of 13 recipients chosen from among hundreds of nominees.
"This award is one of the most prestigious awards a journalist can receive," Lawrence Breitborde, Dean of the College, said. "Barry Bearak's reporting from Afghanistan was already an impressive feat, but his work has taken on an even greater resonance since the September 11th terrorist attacks, as the world has turned its attention to the areas he is covering."
Bearak, who was born in Chicago and grew up in Skokie, graduated from Knox College with degree in political science. He began his career in Miami as a reporter for The Herald and then became bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. He was a roving national correspondent based in Miami and later New York, writing in-depth stories on the American labor movement, low-income housing and homelessness. In 1992, he won the Meyer Berger Award from Columbia University for distinguished reporting on New York City.
Founded in 1837, Knox is a national liberal arts college in Galesburg, Illinois, with students from 47 states and 42 nations. Knox's "Old Main" is a National Historic Landmark and the only building remaining from the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.
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