Kim Murphy
Moscow Bureau Chief
Los Angeles Times

Citation
Kim Murphy doesn't just cover the news. She tells stories that help her readers care about, and understand, the news. In reporting on Chechnya, she wrote a gripping piece about so-called "black widows"-female suicide bombers who stalk Russia. In her coverage of Chechen separatists who took hundreds of people hostage at a school in the Russian city of Beslan, she featured a 27-year-old Russian mother and hostage who was forced "to make a Sophie's choice: Save one child and leave behind another, possibly to face death." As Moscow bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, Murphy wrote with authority and clarity about the political shift taking place under Russian President Vladimir Putin and its implications for U.S.-Russian relations. Her remarkable body of work reflects the range of stories that foreign correspondents-at their best-craft, often in very difficult circumstances and at great personal risk.

Excerpt
Russian Hostage Crisis
September 04, 2004
BESLAN, Russia _ Zalina Dzandarova cradles her son Alan as he sleeps with his small face buried against her stomach. He is the child Dzandarova was able to save. The child she chose to save, really. It is the other one, little Alana, her 6-year-old daughter, whose image torments her: Alana clutching her hand, Alana crying and calling after her. Alana's sobs disappearing into the distance as Dzandarova walked out of Middle School No. 1 here Thursday, clutching 2-year-old Alan in her arms.
Guerrillas armed with automatic rifles and explosive belts who are holding hundreds of hostages at the small provincial school in southern Russia allowed 26 women and children to leave. About a dozen mothers, like Dzandarova, were allowed to take only one child, forced to leave another behind.
"I didn't want to make this choice," a stunned-looking Dzandarova, 27, said in the reception room of her father-in-law's house a few miles from the school. "People say they are happy that my son and I are saved. But how can I be happy if my daughter's still inside there?"
Violence often selects its victims randomly, but seldom is a mother asked to make a Sophie's choice: Save one child and leave behind another, possibly to face death. The standoff in North Ossetia republic involving about 20 guerrillas -- most likely linked to the neighboring separatist republic of Chechnya or adjacent Ingushetia -- has stunned a nation accustomed to war and its horrors after the many ethnic and territorial conflicts that accompanied the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Even with the downing of two Russian jetliners and two street bombings coming in just one week, the thought of schoolchildren surrounded by veiled female suicide bombers and masked guerrillas has traumatized the country. "They Have Taken Hundreds of Our Children," read a banner headline in the daily newspaper Izvestia.
And they took Alana.

Biography
Kim Murphy, 49, has been a foreign and national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times for the past 15 years, covering assignments in Russia, the Middle East, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and the Pacific Northwest. She joined the paper in 1983 as a general assignment staff writer for the Orange County edition. Previously she worked as a reporter and assistant metro editor at the Orange County Register, a reporter at the Minot Daily News in North Dakota, and an assistant editor at the North Biloxian in Mississippi. Earlier this year she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Her work has also been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists, the Orange County Press Club, and the North Dakota Sigma Delta Chi, among others. A native of Indianapolis and a graduate of Minot State University, Murphy is married and has two children.