New Delhi: The Wire’s five-part multimedia series “Breaking the Nets: An Oral History of India’s Fisherwomen” has been awarded the 2025 One World Media Awards in the Innovative Storytelling category.

The award announcement on the social media site Bluesky notes that the series reveals the "invisible labour of women in India’s fishing industry and their fight for rights through solidarity and action."

The One World Media Awards recognise media coverage from and about the Global South. The award pages mentions that it focuses on stories that break through stereotypes, change the narrative and connect people across cultures.

The series – reported by Shamsheer Yousaf, Monica Jha and Sriram Vittalamurthy – merges oral histories and immersive multimedia reportage to tell stories of resilience across six Indian regions, including the Sundarban, Gulf of Mannar, Odisha, Puducherry, Mumbai, and Bihar.

The series is a record of the everyday lives of fisherwomen and also underscores their collective efforts to assert rights, access public spaces and challenge patriarchal and caste hierarchies. It also calls attention to how government policies have failed to formally acknowledge their labour in the fishing economy.

The series has already won the 2024 K.P. Narayana Kumar Memorial Award for Social Impact Journalism by the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) and the Excellence in Online/Digital Journalism, Immersive Storytelling award by the Asian American Journalists Association.

The series has also won the New Media Writing Prize 2024 FIPP Journalism Award. It will be archived by the British Library as one of the works that have been shortlisted.

Find the series here. 

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