Kathy Gannon

For 35 years, Kathy Gannon covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for The Associated Press as chief correspondent and later as news director. She has also reported on the 2006 war in southern Lebanon, the Iraq war, the Central Asian states, and Azerbaijan. Gannon was the only Western journalist allowed in Kabul by the Taliban in the weeks preceding the 2001 U.S.-British offensive in Afghanistan. In addition to her coverage of South and Central Asia, she has reported on the Middle East, including the 2006 Israeli war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the war in northern Iraq.

In April 2014, Gannon was seriously wounded—hit by seven bullets—while covering preparations for the Afghan national elections when an Afghan police officer opened fire on the car in which she was riding. Her colleague and close friend, AP photographer Anja Niedringhaus, was killed in the attack.

She underwent 18 surgeries and returned to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where she explored sexual abuse in Islamic madrassas, took a deep dive into honour killings (which claim the lives of more than a thousand women each year at the hands of their family members), followed the Taliban’s sweep through Afghanistan, and returned to cover another presidential election in 2019.

A Canadian citizen, she was the city editor at the Kelowna Courier in British Columbia and worked at several Canadian newspapers. She has received numerous awards, including two honorary doctorate degrees, New York’s Columbia University School of Journalism Lifetime Award, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Burton Benjamin Award for press freedom, the John Peter and Anna Catherine Zenger Freedom of the Press Award from the University of Arizona School of Journalism, and the James Foley Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrated Marketing Communications.