Former Citizen reporter receives $25K fellowship
Canadian journalist and former Ottawa Citizen correspondent Michael Petrou was awarded the R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellowship Wednesday at an event on Parliament Hill with the Travers family in attendance.
Petrou is being awarded the $25,000 fellowship, administered by Carleton University, to examine the ways in which the Syrian civil war has resulted in the largest displacement of people since the Second World War. Petrou will be working with the National Post and Postmedia on his project.
“I will be reporting on the millions of Syrian refugees who have not made it to Canada, or Europe — instead remaining in, and transforming, the Middle East countries hosting them,” Petrou says.
Sen. Jim Munson congratulated Petrou, who has worked as a foreign correspondent across Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, for his desire to report this story.
Travers was a former editor of the Citizen, executive editor of the Toronto Star and an awardwinning Ottawa columnist for the Star at the time of his death on March 3, 2011.
“Jim (Travers) will always be remembered for bringing the Canadian perspective to international events,” Munson says.
“His legacy is inspiring a new generation of foreign correspondents and I congratulate this year’s fellowship recipient, Michael Petrou, for tackling the dramatic, heartwrenching story of Syrian refugees.”
Travers covered many major stories during the 1980s while working in Africa and the Middle East, including the Ethiopian famine, the Iran-Iraq war, apartheid in South Africa and the conflict in Lebanon.
To Petrou, Travers was a “superb journalist and a compassionate, kind and endlessly generous man.”
Susan Harada, associate director of Carleton’s School of Journalism and Communication, said the award was “a fitting tribute to Jim Travers that the fellowship in his name received so many excellent proposals from such strong journalists.”
Harada indicates the significance of Petrou’s proposal that focuses on a story continuing to unfold, “(it) will continue to have far-reaching consequences on public policy, both at home and abroad.”