The One Young World Journalist of the Year Award was created in 2020 to recognise five ground-breaking journalists under the age of 35 from around the world. Launched again this year, it continues to celebrate courageous young leaders who have shown considerable commitment to inspiring and empowering others through their work, and changing the way stories are reported in often turbulent journalistic landscapes.
The expert judging panel has been invited by One Young World to choose five winners who have created meaningful global impact through exceptionally crafted reporting and who are passionate about the rights to freedom of thought, expression and speech.
The judges for the 2023 award are:
Hossam Bahgat
Hossam Bahgat is a human rights defender and journalist with a background in political science and international human rights law. From 2002 to 2013, Bahgat was the founding executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, and recently returned to lead the organization in 2020. His investigative stories appeared in the independent news service Mada Masr. He served as board chair of the International Network for Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. In 2010, Human Rights Watch awarded Bahgat the Allison Des Forges Award for Extraordinary Activism and in 2014 he received the Catherine and George Alexander Law Prize from Santa Clara University. Bahgat is also the recipient of the Anna Politkovskaya award for courageous Journalism for his work in investigative journalism.
Ilia Calderón
Ilia Calderón is co-anchor of Univision Network’s flagship evening newscast, “Noticiero Univision” and she also co-hosts Univision’s primetime newsmagazine, “Aquí y Ahora.” Calderón is the first Afro-Latina anchoring an evening newscast for a major broadcast network in the United States. She previously reached a similar milestone in her native Colombia, as the first black woman to ever host a national news program in her country: “Noticiero CMI.”
Prior to joining Jorge Ramos on “Noticiero Univision” in 2017, she was co-anchor of Univision’s “Noticiero Univision Edición Nocturna”, before that she was co-anchor of Univision’s “Primer Impacto” (First Impact). Prior to that, she served as co-anchor of the weekend edition, “Primer Impacto Fin de Semana”. Before joining Univision, Calderon co-anchored Telemundo’s weekend national newscast and Telemundo Internacional, where she interviewed numerous prominent politicians and celebrities, among them former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe, and world-famous singer/songwriter Shakira.
As a respected journalist, Calderón has received several recognitions during her professional career, including an Emmy® Award. In 2005, she received the “Premio Orquídea” award, which honours Colombians abroad, for Best International Journalist of the Year. In 2002, she was named one of the 100 most important Hispanic journalists by the Hispanic Media 100 organization.
Solomon Serwanjja
Solomon Serwanjja is a Ugandan award-winning investigative journalist and the Executive Director of the African Institute for Investigative Journalism. He has an incremental experience of 15 years in investigative reporting and broadcast journalism, as a whole having worked with national, regional and international media. Mr. Serwanjja is a BBC Komla Dumor award winner and a recipient of the African Centre for Media Excellence (ACME). Mr. Serwanjja has also amassed a large social media following shaping narratives and global conversations on a number of issues including the economy, politics, media, and health.
Tanya Talaga
Tanya Talaga is an Anishinaabe journalist and speaker. Talaga’s mother’s family is from Fort William First Nation and her father was Polish-Canadian.
For more than 20 years, she was a journalist at the Toronto Star covering everything from health to education, investigations and Queen’s Park. She’s been nominated five times for the Michener Award in public service journalism and been part of teams that won two National Newspaper Awards for Project of the Year. She is now a columnist at The Globe & Mail, Canada's national newspaper.
Her first book, Seven Fallen Feathers, is a national bestseller, winning the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the First Nation Communities Read Award: Young Adult/Adult. The book was also a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the BC National Award for Nonfiction.
Her second book, All Our Relations: Finding The Path Forward, is also a national bestseller, finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and a finalist for the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. Her third book, The Knowing: The Enduring Legacy of Residential Schools, will be out this October.
Talaga was the 2018 CBC Massey Lecturer, the first Anishinaabe woman to be so. Talaga is the President and CEO of Makwa Creative Inc., a production company focused on amplifying Indigenous voices through documentary films, TV and podcasts. She holds five honorary doctorates.
Yalda Hakim
Yalda Hakim is an award-winning foreign correspondent and currently is a Chief Presenter on BBC News. In addition to her presenting duties, Yalda continues to deliver hard-hitting journalism in the field, for the Our World strand and across BBC News in both television and radio.
In August 2021, Yalda led BBC World News coverage of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the collapse of the Afghan government and the Taliban’s return to power. Just days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Yalda began reporting from the Ukrainian city of Lviv. She provided round the clock coverage for the BBC’s domestic and international audiences for the first weeks of the war – hosting BBC World News and also co-presenting Newsnight.
Yalda has secured a number of high-profile interviews for the BBC. She was the first international journalist to interview US Secretary of State Antony Blinken; her interview with President Trump’s National Security Advisor HR McMaster made global headlines when he accepted that Russia had interfered in the 2016 US elections. Other interviews have included Hollywood actor and director Angelina Jolie, Prince Albert of Monaco, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In addition to her work in Afghanistan and Ukraine, Yalda has spent time producing and reporting content from some of the world’s most dangerous places, including Iraq, South Sudan and Eritrea.
