British architect Alison Killing has become the first of her profession to win a Pulitzer Prize for reportage with a series of articles revealing a network of Chinese prison camps allegedly built to incarcerate Muslims.
Killing, who is an architect and geospatial analyst based in Rotterdam, is thought to be the first architect to win a prestigious Pulitzer journalism prize for writing rather than criticism.
She won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting together with reporter Megha Rajagopalan and programmer Christo Buschek.
Killing used her expertise in forensic analysis of architecture and satellite images of buildings to expose secret camps allegedly built by the Chinese state in the Xinjiang region to imprison Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities. 268 internment camps identified
The detainment infrastructure was unveiled in a series of articles for Buzzfeed News, which were published from August to December 2020.
The Pulitzer jury awarded the team the prize for "a distinguished example of reporting on international affairs, using any available journalistic tool." Killing, Rajagopalan and Buschek won $15,000 for their work.
Killing identified the prison sites by comparing areas on China's map tool Baidu Maps with images from external satellite data providers and seeing which areas were blanked out on Baidu Maps.
An original list of over five million censored locations was narrowed down to 50,000. Killing then went through them by looking for...