Tonight the Illawarra Mercury will be centrestage at Australian journalism’s night of nights.
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The 63rd annual Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism will be announced at a gala function in Brisbane on Thursday night.
The Mercury will be strongly represented.
Award-winning Illawarra Mercury photographer Sylvia Liber will be there to accept not one, but two Walkley photographic awards.
Liber was recently announced as the winner of the Nikon-Walkey award winner for the portraiture prize and the best community/regional prize.
A portfolio of work titled “Sea of Emotions” won the veteran photographer the Community/Regional Prize.
Liber won the Portrait Prize for her photo “Trapped in the wrong body”.
The powerful image showed South Coast couple Aley Halverson and Charlotte Tortorella – two people on very different journeys of self-discovery, who came together in a love that transcends gender.
This year’s dual award win takes Liber’s Walkley count to four Walkleys.
In 2015, she won the Community/Regional Prize for a series of five pictures.
In 2014, Liber took out the Portrait Prize for a photograph titled “Little Princess”.
Journalist Shannon Tonkin is a finalist in the Best Coverage of Community or Regional Affairs for the Mercury’s State of Neglect campaign.
The State of Neglect campaign has called for increased penalties for serious cases of child neglect in NSW.
The campaign began after Tonkin revealed a shocking case of child neglect involving an Illawarra mother.
Already this year, Tonkin was honoured with the Chris Watson Award for Outstanding Regional Newspaper Reporting category in the prestigious Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism for her work on the campaign.
The awards will be broadcast live on Sky News Extra Foxtel channel 604 and streamed live on walkleys.com from 8.30pm.
