OPC Award Winners Share Their Stories: The Ed Cunningham Award 

Join the OPC for an online discussion with winners of this year’s Ed Cunningham Award for best magazine-style, long-form narrative feature in print or digital on an international story.

RSVPs are required. Links to the video conference call will be emailed to registrants before the program begins.

Participating in the call will be Alex Perry, who won for his piece for Outside magazine, titled “The Last Days of John Allen Chau.” Perry is a freelance journalist and author. His work has won numerous awards and appeared in Outside, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Guardian and others. From 2001 to 2014 he was a TIME magazine bureau chief in Hong Kong, India and Africa. His latest book is The Good Mothers: The Story of the Women Who Took on the World’s Most Powerful Mafia.

Megan Stack, the head judge for this year's Ed Cunningham Award, will moderate. Stack is a journalist and author, most recently, of Women's Work. Her first book, Every Man In This VIllage Is A Liar, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has lived and worked in Buenos Aires, Jerusalem, Cairo, Moscow, Beijing, New Delhi and Singapore, and now lives in Washington DC.

Judges for the Ed Cunningham Award called Perry's article a "superb feat of compulsively readable storytelling," adding that "Alex Perry weaves a deeply humanizing portrait of a young man with a deadly missionary zeal and illuminates the ongoing effects of missionary work, adventurism and the exoticism of the world’s remote peoples."

You can read "The Last Days of John Allen Chau" here.