“I was not given any reason but told I would not be able to travel internationally,” Sanna Irshad Mattoo, who was denied permission to fly abroad.
Team Clarion
NEW DELHI – Kashmiri photojournalist Sanna Irshad Mattoo, who recently won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize award, claimed that authorities at the Delhi airport, on Saturday, denied her permission to travel abroad for a scheduled photography exhibition in Paris.
“I was scheduled to travel from Delhi to Paris today for a book launch and photography exhibition as one of 10 award winners of the Serendipity Arles grant 2020. Despite procuring a French visa, I was stopped at the immigration desk at Delhi airport,” Mattoo said in a tweet.
“I was not given any reason but told I would not be able to travel internationally,” the journalist added.
Mattoo won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize award in the Feature Photography 2022 category for the coverage of COVID crisis in India in May this year.
Mattoo and her colleagues, Adnan Abidi, late Danish Siddiqui and Amit Dave, from the Reuters news agency won the award in feature photography category for “images of Covid’s toll in India that balanced intimacy and devastation, while offering viewers a heightened sense of place.”
Danish Siddiqui was killed in Afghanistan last year while covering a gunfight between Taliban and security forces of the erstwhile government.
Before Matoo, three more Kashmiri photojournalists Dar Yasin, Mukhtar Khan, and Channi Anand won the prestigious Pulitzer in 2020 for their coverage of the Kashmir 2019 lockdown.
The Pulitzer Prize is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature and musical composition within the United States.
