Stephanie Nolen
winner of the 2004-05
Markwell Media Award

The Markwell Award is presented to someone in the media whose work best reflects the purposes and the spirit of the International Society of Political Psychology. In the context of this year's conference theme, the Award Selection Committee was convinced that Stephanie Nolen more than met the criteria. For samples of Stephanie Nolen's work, click here.

Through her work as Africa correspondent for the Toronto Globe and Mail, Stephanie Nolen bears daily witness to the world and brings the complex and richly textured life of Africans to hundreds of thousands of Canadian and other readers. Very few journalists possess that combination of creative brilliance, humanitarian compassion, personal courage, and the relentless pursuit of truth that combine to make much of what Stephanie Nolen writes vivid and urgent for her readers.

Nolen writes of people and parts of the world that are under the radar and should not be. She grasps the big contextual frames of history and political economy and into this she unfolds her astute analyses of the political psychology of leadership, tyranny, gender relations, race and hope for reconciliation. Just one of many instances of her important work is a column from the Globe and Mail dated March 7, 2005, "Taking on Mugabe." Nolen tells us about Heather Bennett, the wife of an imprisoned Zimbabwe politician. Woven through her account of aspects of the political culture, political economy and the current regime in Zimbabwe, Stephanie Nolen brings to life the way in which ordinary people may be motivated and prompted to heroic acts of personal defiance.

Like so much else that she writes - on women under the Taliban, the child soldiers of Uganda, post-apartheid South Africa, and the horrors of rape camps in Rwanda - the account of Ms. Bennett effortlessly weaves together strands of the personal with the political. Stephanie Nolen's perceptive eye zooms us in and out from the tiny personal details of daily life to global politics and back again. While writing of the darkest aspects of humanity, Stephanie Nolen never loses her focus on the mundane, the routine and all that is warm, funny and positive in life. A recurring theme in her work is the politics of hope.

Born in Montreal and raised there and in Ottawa, Stephanie Nolen has advanced degrees in journalism and economic development. In addition to the Globe and Mail, her work has appeared in other publications including Newsweek and the Independent. She is the author of Promised the Moon: the Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race (Penguin Books, 2002) and Shakespeare's Face (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2002).

Nolen has been honored with two Amnesty International Awards for journalism as well as two Canadian National Newspaper Awards for international reporting. In further honoring Stephanie Nolen, the International Society of Political Psychology affirms her work so far and offers support and encouragement for her continued contributions to relevant, incisive, and critical journalism.

And from Stephanie Nolen...

Thank you so much for your note, which comes as a delightful surprise. An award like this is a source of great encouragement.

And it's also a pleasure to hear that you have judged my reporting out of Africa to be relevant to the field of political psychology; it has been part of my mandate to get to see Africa... as places with a lot of different political processes underway.

You've chosen to commend me for the very thing that I try so hard to do: to make the people in these conflicts and disasters real, and to make clear that there is never reason to think of it all merely as hopeless.

I appreciate this recognition more than I can say.

For samples of Stephanie Nolen's work, click here.