Michael Kelly Award

2023 Winner: Lynzy Billing, ProPublica
Over the course of nearly four years, Lynzy Billing, an intrepid and independent investigative journalist, did “what it appeared that no one else was doing—nor will be able to do again” in Afghanistan. Armed with little but her own courage, determination, and unfaltering thirst for the truth, Billing identified hundreds of civilian killings at the hands of CIA-backed Afghan special forces, also known as Zero Unit squadrons. For ProPublica’s “The Night Raids,” Billing traversed hundreds of miles along the eastern province of Nangarhar, interviewing survivors and eye-witnesses of night raids in remote villages. She managed to eventually speak with a former Afghan spy chief, as well as two former Zero Unit soldiers. Tellingly, Billing’s intimate and piercing account of the incalculable human toll taken by the longest war in U.S. history also contains traces of her own past. In the early 1990s, during the Afghan civil war that followed the Soviet Union’s withdrawal, Billing’s biological mother and twin sister were killed in a night raid. Billing, who was born in Afghanistan, was eventually adopted by a British family and moved abroad.