US journalist Joshua Sharpe and Ukranian journalist Luliia Mendel have picked the winners of the six edition of the Union of Campus Journalists (UCJ), University of Ibadan (UI) inter-university essay competition.

The competition, now in its sixth year, is endowed by ‘Fisayo Soyombo, a former UCJ UI president now the founder of the Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ).

A total of 336 entries received from university students across Nigeria were first pruned by Damilola Ayeni, Editor of FIJ, with the resultant 23 essays passed on to 2023-24 Knight Wallace fellows Sharpe and Mendel.

JOSHUA SHARPE

A 2023-2024 Knight-Wallace Fellow, Sharpe is a print and audio journalist, and editor, whose stories have helped free two innocent people from life in prison and exposed deadly government failures.

In 2021, he won the Livingston Award, a national Murrow Award, a National Headliner Award and a Southeast Emmy for a documentary, ‘The Imperfect Alibi’, about Sharpe’s investigation into the 1985 murders of a couple inside their historic Black church in rural Georgia. Sharpe, a 2022 and 2023 Pulitzer Prizes judge, is writing a book called, ‘The Man No One Believed’, for W.W. Norton and Company about the still unfolding aftermath of the church murders case.

Sharpe’s reporting uncovered new evidence on a purported white supremacist who allegedly bragged about the murders, leading to a new police investigation and Dennis Perry’s release from life in prison.

IULIIA MENDEL

Mendel is an independent Ukrainian journalist, political commentator, and opinion writer for The Washington Post who served as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s press secretary from June 2019 to July 2021. She wrote a book about this experience, titled ‘The Fight of Our Lives’. At Wallace House, Mendel research’s sought solutions to protect and empower truth-seeking journalists in Ukraine and around the world in a climate of growing populism.

THE WINNERS

The three winners of the contest — two from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) and one from the University of Ibadan — selected by Sharpe and Mendel will be awared at a ceremony on Saturday evening.

The first prize winner will receive N250,000, second prize N150,000 and third prize N100,000. All three also have the opportunity to intern at the FIJ if they want.