Reuters photographer Thomas Mukoya was named Photographer of the Year by the Media Council of Kenya for ‘a leap to freedom’, an image of a female protestor breaking free after being detained during a demonstration.
Mukoya was also named 1st runner-up in the Overall Journalist of the Year category. In the Canon Kenyan Photography Awards, Mukoya was named News Photographer of the Year for his series shot at the University of Nairobi riots in May 2014, and Sports Photographer of the Year for his series from the 2014 Maasai Olympics.
Born and based in Nairobi, Mukoya covers breaking news, sports and features for Reuters and has a special interest in humanitarian stories. He took a keen interest in photography from an early age – his earliest memory of photography is looking at newspaper pictures in 1984 from the drought ravaged Horn of Africa nation of Ethiopia – and specialised in photojournalism while studying journalism in Nairobi.
He would later go on to cover the famine and drought in the Horn of Africa in 2011, where he witnessed the resilience, suffering and death of people in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya when the United Nations had declared the famine as the worst in 60 years.
