Sally Armstrong, 2017 Magazine Award Winner
Human rights activist, journalist and award-winning author Sally Armstrong has covered stories about women and girls in zones of conflict all over the world. From Bosnia and Somalia to the Middle East, Rwanda, Congo and Afghanistan and Iraq, her eye witness reports have earned her awards including the Gold Award from the National Magazine Awards Foundation and the Author's Award from the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters. She received the Amnesty International Canada Media Award in 2000, 2002 and again in 2011. Sally was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1998 and appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada by Governor General Julie Payette in December, 2017.
Her winning submission was called Resisting Genocide and details the experience of the Yazidi women who were taken by ISIS as sex slaves, their return and their subsequent fight to keep their way of life . It was published in The United Church Observer (now Broadview Magazine) on June 1, 2017.
Sally has been the editor of Homemaker Magazine, and authored several books, the most recent of which is Ascent of Women: A New Age is Dawning for Every Mother's Daughter published by Random House in 2013. It was updated and re-titled to Uprising: A New Age in Dawning for Every Mother's Daughter by St Martins Press in New York and published in 2014.
As editor-in-chief of Homemaker Magazine, she was the first to publish a story on the systematic raping of women and girls during the Balkan war in 1992. For the last seventeen years, she has been a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Maclean's Magazine, the National Post, L'Acutalite, Chatelaine, Reader's Digest, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times and The United Church Observer (now Broadview Magazine).
The focus of her freelance work for the last decade has been chiefly on covering zones of conflict from the point of view of what happens to women and girls.
Despite the challenges of investigating and reporting on stories relating to the experiences of women and girls in places such as Afghanistan, the Congo, and Nepal, she feels rewarded because in her experience "the coverage of their status has moved their stories from obscure to page one."
@SallyArmstrong9
sallyarmstrong.ca
Broadview Magazine
Winning article here
