Finbarr O’Reilly started journalism as an arts writer for national newspapers in Canada in 1998. He joined Reuters in 2001 as a freelance text correspondent in Kinshasa, Congo and spent two years covering Central Africa’s Great Lakes region from Kinshasa and from Kigali, Rwanda. He has also written for The Economist and reported for the BBC and CNN.
He took up photography full-time in 2005 and covers West and Central Africa for Reuters, based in Dakar, Senegal. In 2006, he was awarded the World Press Photo of the Year for his picture of a mother and child at a feeding centre in Niger: http://www.worldpressphoto.org/index.php?option=com_photogallery&task=view&id=903&Itemid=115&bandwidth=high
Other awards include First Place multimedia news story in the 2009 POYi for Congo coverage http://poyi.org/66/24/01.php and a 2005 NPPA honorable mention for a portrait of a refugee girl in Darfur http://bop.nppa.org/2005/still_photography/winners/PAP/30982/64789.html
His photographs of children at the Stand Proud polio center in Kinshasa http://finbarroreilly.com/?s=8&t=cats&d=2&p=0 have been singled out for several awards, including Honourable Mention for the 2007 UNICEF picture of the year http://www.unicef.de/foto/2007/english/fo-im.htm
Finbarr's support for Stand Proud http://standproud.org/ won him the 2008 Reuters Community Champion Award and he thanks Reuters for its generous $25,000 gift to the charity. For donations, please visit: http://standproud.org/howhelp.htm
Apart from photography, Finbarr received a Canadian Award for Excellence in Journalism for a magazine article on Rwanda and was Associate Producer of Ghosts of Lomako, a documentary film on Congo that won a Gold Medal at the New York International Film & TV Festival in 2003.
Nationality: British and Canadian
