Pulitzer Prize Winner Teaches Workshop in Hoedspruit

~American Journalist Thomas French Visits Amazwi During Trip to Southern Africa~

Hoedspruit, South Africa - 2 April 2007 - "Avuxeni! Minjani?" said Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas French, greeting students in Tsonga as he began his 3-hour workshop on interview techniques at the Amazwi School of Media Arts (SOMA) on Monday.

French, of the Saint Petersburg Times (Florida, USA), spent the morning sharing his reporting tools, amassed from 25 years of interviewing both everyday citizens and celebrities.  He then demonstrated these methods during a model interview with 24-year-old student Constance Rahlane of Cottondale.

"I was excited to hear a little bit about their stories, and they were great," French said of the SOMA students.  "They were very open and engaged, and I can't wait to see the stories they are going to write--about their lives and other African lives."

French won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1998.  He was recognized for his St. Petersburg Times' serial narrative "Angels & Demons," a series about a mother and her two daughters who were murdered while on holiday.  He continues to work for the Times, where he is a special projects reporter, specializing in serial narratives that include long periods of immersion journalism.  French has also transformed two of his projects into books, Unanswered Cries and South of Heaven.  

"It was an honor to have Tom workshop with our students," said Amazwi's Founding Director Maggie Messitt, whom French mentored at Goucher College.  "His passion for story and the craft behind creating narrative nonfiction is infectious, and I was excited to watch our students absorb that energy, while also learning the skills of reporting from one of the best in the business."

French's itinerary in southern Africa has included Johannesburg, where he led narrative workshops at The Star and was keynote speaker at the Southern African Narrative Journalism Conference.  Prior to arriving in Hoedspruit, French and his wife, Kelley Benham, also a writer and editor for the Times, traveled through Swaziland, where he reported on the Swazi elephants who now reside at a zoo near his home in Florida.

French has been working on a lengthy project at the Tampa Zoo for the past four years following a collection of both keepers and animals.  Reporting on the ground in Swazi's Royal Reserves provided him with his final research on Swaziland's controversial alternative to elephant culling, with which he will begin writing the series and potentially a book.

From Hoedspruit, he is embarking on a walking safari with Transfrontiers in Klaserie Private Game Reserve.

The Amazwi School of Media Arts offers Shangaan and Sotho women between 22 and 34 years of age an intensive, full-time, 10-month program in journalism, which will culminate in a certificate in Narrative Journalism and Fieldwork Studies. 

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