AP photographers Eranga Jayawardena and Rafiq Maqbool were named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography for images capturing anger over economic collapse in Sri Lanka.
The AP images from Sri Lanka captured the full range of human emotion with protesters pumping their fists in the air shouting anti-government slogans, and also shielding themselves from tear gas and water cannons.
Crowds of Sri Lankans storming the office of the Prime Minister, after the President fled the country, and others celebrating inside the President’s official residence, by jumping in the pool and using the gym equipment.
Eranga Jayawardena was born April 11, 1978, and brought up in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and has been a witness and a recorder through news photography of key natural, socio-political and entertainment events for more than 20 years of his life. Eranga, in 1996 started, taking up assignments, while still at school, for The Island and they mostly comprised of politically motivated ethnicity based violent events.
Rafiq Maqbool is a staff photographer for Associated Press and has been based in Mumbai, India, since 2009. For AP he has covered some of South Asia’s most troubled hotspots, including his homeland of Kashmir. He has extensively documented militancy and violence at its height, in the late 1990s, including the Kargil war between India and Pakistan, as well as the devastating earthquake of 2005 in the region.
The Associated Press has won two Pulitzer Prizes in journalism for its coverage of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, in the categories of public service and breaking news photography. The AP’s coverage of the siege of Mariupol was credited with saving thousands of lives. AL.com, based in Birmingham, Alabama, won Pulitzers for editorial writing and local news coverage. The New York Times also won for Ukraine coverage.
It and the Los Angeles Times won two Pulitzers. The Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Mississippi Today and Gimlet Media also won awards. The Pulitzers annually honour the best in journalism.