One award that marked my life was the 2019 Ortega y Gasset Prize for the story Los muertos que me habitan, which featured photographs by Edu Ponces —and whose title was inspired by Luis Cernuda. That storie sums up the world I have seen and tried to explain.

Together with the photographer Pau Coll, I produced a report in Huelva, Una chabola al final del camino, a slap of reality that won the 2022 Saliou Traoré Award for Spanish-language journalism on Africa.

I don’t have many book awards — they’re harder and far less common — but they bring enormous joy. We Are Not Refugees was chosen as the recommended journalism book of the 2017 Festival Gabo, a category inaugurated that very year.

La huérfana del Mediterráneo —published in The New York Times— received a Special Mention in the 15th edition of the Manuel Alcántara International Journalism Prize. I was part of the journalistic team that received the Montserrat Roig Award for Social Journalism in 2020; among the pieces included was a story about Omar Diallo, a teenager who took his own life after falling into irregular status when he was subjected to an age determination test. In 2023, I received another Montserrat Roig Award, this time in the field of social rights and social action, which allowed Anna Surinyach and me to carry out the project Jóvenes y mayores bien acompañados.

There is plenty of criticism of the world of awards because of the excessive egos that sometimes surround it. And it’s true — it does happen. But I also like to see it another way: many of these stories, even though I believed they were important at the time, didn’t receive much attention, and the awards helped them have a far greater impact. They also gave me strengh —emotional and financial— to keep going.

I suppose that’s what they’re for.