Malak A. Tantish, the former Gaza correspondent for The Guardian, has won the Mary Colvin Award in the “Promising New Journalist” category at the 2025 British Journalism Awards for her frontline reporting on the Gaza war.
Tantish spent about 18 months covering the conflict from inside the enclave over a more than two-year war, producing widely discussed dispatches that blended rigorous newsgathering with intimate portraiture of civilian life under bombardment. Among her standout pieces were a January report on returning to her family home in Beit Lahia after a ceasefire—finding the house and garden reduced to rubble—and an investigation from a Gaza hospital documenting the plight of severely malnourished children.
Award judges said her work embodies “all the hallmarks of Mary’s spirit: courage, empathy with those at the heart of the story, and a relentless commitment to the truth in the most difficult circumstances,” referencing the late Sunday Times correspondent Mary Colvin, killed in Syria in 2012.
The Guardian collected additional honors on the night. Technology reporter Harry Davies was recognized in the tech journalism category for a collaborative project with +972 Magazine examining links between Israel’s military and Microsoft during the Gaza conflict. Separately, UK broadcaster Channel 4 News was named News Provider of the Year.
Tantish, pictured in recent months alongside her sister Inas amid Gaza’s destruction, has been noted for reports that interweave personal loss with on-the-ground evidence, giving global audiences a visceral view of the war’s civilian toll.