Judges
COTM | BTG SHORTLIST 2025
$30,000 MAIN AWARD
Anastasia Taylor-Lind
5K from the Frontline
Anastasia Taylor-Lind is a British/Swedish photojournalist and a poet.
For the past decade Anastasia has collaborated with Alisa Sopova, a journalist and an anthropologist from the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. In 2023, she received the Canon Female Photojournalist Award for her long-term reporting from eastern Ukraine, and over 100,000 people visited her exhibition 'Ukraine: Photographs from the Frontline' at the Imperial War Museum.
Anastasia is a National Geographic Society Explorer, TED Fellow, and 2016 Nieman Fellow at Harvard university. Her first book Maidan – Portraits from the Black Square, about the 2014 revolution in Ukraine, was published the same year. Her debut poetry collection One Language was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022.
Anastasia has Masters degrees in photojournalism and poetry.
5K from the Frontline
5K from the Frontline is an interactive multimedia project that started in 2018 and illuminates the everyday experience of living with war in eastern Ukraine.
We are a team of two: a British-Swedish photojournalist, Anastasia Taylor-Lind, and a Ukrainian writer, Alisa Sopova, who have been reporting together on the war in Ukraine for a decade. Our work focuses primarily on the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine because this is where the war started in 2014 and where it has been most violent and destructive ever since.
Most of the places featured in 5K from the Frontline through the years—Avdiivka, Marinka, Krasnohorivka, Kurakhove, Toretsk—were destroyed after 2022. Whole towns were reduced to piles of rubble—wastelands of death and destruction in places where millions of people used to live, work, fall in love, raise children, dream, and host family dinners. We continue following these people and their communities through their experiences of loss, displacement, and the struggle to re-establish their shattered lives.
