Mark Townsend
with Elena Morresi & Laure Boulinier, The Guardian
Mark Townsend has reported on many of the world’s major stories and conflicts during 24 years with the Guardian and its former sister newspaper, the Observer. A senior reporter on the Guardian’s global development desk, he covers international politics and human rights. Mark’s many accolades include reporter of the year at the British Press Awards.
His shortlisted pieces were:
- They slaughtered us like animals’: the inside story of how the UK let one of the biggest atrocities of the Sudan war unfold. let
- ‘We will never, ever escape’: inside the ever-tightening siege of the Sudanese city of El Fasher
- Heroism, horror and the ‘pits of hell’: inside the last days of El Fasher.
Reading Townsend’s Sudan trilogy felt, at times, almost unbearable – and that is exactly as it should be. Over a year he tracked the catastrophe from the massacre at Zamzam to the final fall of El Fasher, never letting you look away: not from the nurse with a kitchen knife, not from the grandmother of 75 in a trench, not from the international community’s shameful, documented failure to act. What I find remarkable is that he holds both things at once – the intimate human detail and the hard geopolitical analysis. That is very difficult to do, and Townsend does it every time.
– Meenakshi Ravi, Judge, The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2026
