Award name: 10 The Ed Cunningham Award

Rowan Jacobsen’s beautifully crafted story about a herd of displaced elephants terrorizing a farming community in India is magazine writing at its best. It took us into a world we didn’t know existed and taught us something new about the larger conflict between animal and man in vivid and compelling detail. It’s a testament to the power of his reporting and narrative that the story magically stayed with us long after we read it.

“When small communities abandon their languages and switch to English or Spanish, there is a massive disruption in the transfer of traditional knowledge across generations,” writes Russ Rymer in this subtle and moving investigation of the centuries-long decimation of tribal languages. From the 2,000 speakers of the Aka language in India to the Seri speakers of Mexico’s Sonoran Desert, who are bringing the language back after it dwindled to 1,000 speakers, to the growing number of Tuvan speakers in Siberia, Rymer’s report gives us a broad look across multiple cultures about the ongoing rescue of the world’s dying languages.

Graeber reported on the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Kamaishi, Japan, focusing on the story of one family — 80-year-old Kenji Sano, and his son, Shigeru, who ran a liquor business and bar. He tells the tale with texture, fresh language, empathy and dimension. Graeber gives a multi-generational perspective to a town that has been battered by nature and decimated by bombings and nuclear holocaust without dirge-like drumbeats. A man survives and continues.

In “Troubled Spirits,” Alma Guillermoprieto is working at top form and with enough length to show what she can do in this piece about how gruesome drug violence and economic decline in Mexico underlie an expansion of cults devoted to St. Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of desperate causes, and La Santa Muerte (Holy Death), guardian of the most defenseless, the worst of sinners and also honored by convicts and killers, or celebrating the mythical bandit Jesus Malverde, now a “narco-saint.” The reporting from within Mexico’s prisons and shrines is outstanding, the topic fresh and vital. The judges found the care and intelligence of her work a thrill to read.

Alissa Rubin’s “How Baida Wanted to Die” explores the background, motivation and training of one of 16 would-be female suicide bomber suspects or accomplices captured by the police in Diyala Province, Iraq, since the beginning of 2008.

Best magazine reporting from abroad AWARD YEAR: 2008 AWARD NAME: The Ed Cunningham Award 2008 RECIPIENT: Richard Behar AFFILIATION: Fast Company HONORED WORK: “China Storms Africa” “China Storms Africa” is gale-force reporting about China’s resource rush in Africa. Behar spent months on the road in Mozambique, Zambia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Equatorial Guinea speaking…

Packer writes a brilliant overview and analysis of a failed American counter-insurgency effort in Iraq by focusing on a successful stand-alone operation. Reporting from Tal Afar and Washington, he distills the essence of one effort to pacify Iraq, while lamenting that, in general, it is a road not taken by American political and military leaders.

Best magazine reporting from abroad AWARD YEAR: 2005 AWARD NAME: The Ed Cunningham Award 2005 (shared) RECIPIENT: Julian Barnes (shared with Dexter Filkins) AFFILIATION: U.S. News & World Report HONORED WORK: “Cracking an Insurgent Cell” From the Bush Administration, certainties about Iraq have been un- relenting even as the war has festered. But on the…

Best magazine reporting from abroad AWARD YEAR: 2005 AWARD NAME: The Ed Cunningham Award 2005 (shared) RECIPIENT: Dexter Filkins (shared with Julian Barnes) AFFILIATION: The New York Times Magazine HONORED WORK: “The Fall of the Warrior King” From the Bush Administration, certainties about Iraq have been un- relenting even as the war has festered. But…