The New Yorker Wins Two Overseas Press Club Awards

The winners of the 87th Annual Overseas Press Club Awards , which recognize excellence in international reporting, were announced today, and two pieces published by TheNew Yorker were among the honorees. Jon Lee Anderson won the Ed Cunningham Award, for best magazine-style, long-form narrative feature in print or digital on an international story, for his reporting from a war-torn Syria on the former dissidents held in Bashar al-Assad's prisons. And Ben Taub won the Whitman Bassow Award, for best reporting in any medium on international environmental issues, for his piece on the environmental forces that are irreversibly altering Inuit culture in Greenland.

In " The Witness ," Anderson, a staff writer, travels to Syria in the days after the dictator Bashar al-Assad fled into exile, chronicling the life and death of a prominent dissident, visiting the dungeons of political prisons, and reporting on how the country is reckoning with the end of almost fourteen scourging years of civil war. According to the judges, "Syria's suffering during its long civil war, and the torture inflicted on its dissenters, are almost numbingly familiar-even as the West often looked away. But Jon Lee Anderson, by zooming in on the divergent fates of two brothers, has produced an intimate, haunting tale of the lingering psychic toll."

In Taub's " The Big Ice Is Sick ," the staff writer ventures out on the ice in Greenland with one of the greatest polar-bear hunters in Arctic history, Hjelmer Hammeken, who is confronting a vanishing world. "Taub's stunningly beautiful portrayal of an Inuit society in a remote corner of Greenland, and its collapse due to climate change, colonization and global pollution, is journalism at its finest," the judges wrote. "He doesn't dazzle readers with scientific data so much as focus on how individual lives are affected."

The full list of this year's winners is available here . The awards will be presented at the annual OPC awards dinner in New York on April 20th.