SVT’s Elin Jönsson receives the Cordelia Edvardson award

Elin Jönsson continues:

– The award is a reminder of how important it is to have female foreign correspondents in a guild, and in an environment that is still too macho.

Elin Jönsson would also like to give special thanks to her Ukraine team, and to the photographer Lars Lyrefelt.

– In television, you work together, and without the team there would have been no journalism.

Elin Jönsson has been working since 2022 as a Ukraine correspondent at Sveriges Television. She has extensive experience in covering Russia and the former Soviet republics, and has previously worked as SVT’s Russia correspondent. She has also written a reportage book about the massacre in Andizjan in Uzbekistan in 2005.

“One of our greatest journalistic storytellers”

The jury’s justification for the award reads as follows:

“During Russia’s war against Ukraine, Elin Jönsson has stepped forward as one of our greatest journalistic storytellers. She was already there when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 as well as when Kharkiv was liberated and the mass graves in Izium were found in 2022. Elin Jönsson’s warm, empathetic gaze and calm address lead the viewer’s mind into the stories, where we are not only informed but also given space to think – and feel – themselves. She always follows in the footsteps of classic journalism by being on the spot, and describes what is happening without succumbing to the temptation to fill the subject with her own back.”

Prestigious price

The Cordelia Edvardson prize was established in 2010 by the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University with the aim of awarding a journalist who “has a strong commitment, a personal appeal and an eye for the big in the small”. Previous award winners are Cecilia Uddén, Richard Swartz, Tom Alandh, Magda Gad, Jens Mikkelsen, Nathan Shachar, and Magnus Wennman.