About Kurt Schork Memorial Fund
The Kurt Schork Memorial Fund was created in honor of Kurt Schork, an American journalist who was killed in a military ambush while on assignment for Reuters on May 24, 2000 in Sierra Leone. The Schork family and friends of Kurt Schork, with start-up support from Reuters, established the Fund as a 501(c)(3) organization in March 2001.
It was the work of freelancers and local journalists that Schork valued above all. As a result, Kurt Schork’s friends, colleagues from Reuters and family decided the best way to honor his legacy was to acknowledge those journalists with whom he had a particular bond. The Kurt Schork Awards in International Journalism were created to honor fearless freelance news reporting, and those journalists who cannot leave their country when the story becomes secondary to survival. Two annual prizes of $5,000 each are awarded, one to a freelance journalist covering foreign news, and the second to a local journalist in the developing world or countries in transition. The award process is managed by the Institute for War & Peace Reporting in London.
The recipients of the awards are honored at an ceremony each fall in London. The awards are administered by the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (iwpr.net), the international media development and publishing non-for profit which is based in the UK, US and South Africa.

