Atlas Network and Cátedra Vargas Llosa announce the Carlos Alberto Montaner Young Journalism Prize 2025

Atlas Network and the Cátedra Vargas Llosa are pleased to announce the call for entries for the fifth installment of the Young Journalism Award, a joint initiative that was inaugurated in 2021 and will celebrate its fifth edition in 2025.

For this version of the Young Journalism Prize 2025, the co-organizers have selected an overall theme Mario Vargas Llosa: journalist, thinker and citizen, in remembrance of the late, great Mario Vargas Llosa, who passed away on April 13^th of this year.

The project aims to recognize and promote the values of liberty in Ibero-American journalism. It is endowed with US$10,000 and is aimed at fostering excellence, journalistic rigor, ethical consistency, and the defense of freedom in the practice of journalism.

The prize was renamed the Carlos Alberto Montaner Young Journalism Prize, in honor of the great journalist and distinguished public intellectual Carlos Alberto Montaner, who chaired the jury of this initiative during its first two editions, and who passed away last year.

The jury is chaired by Mr. Montaner’s daughter, Gina Montaner, a well-known and respected journalist. The other members for this year’s edition include Ivabelle Arroyo (Mexico) and Arturo Fontaine (Chile), with Roberto Salinas-León and Raúl Tola, from Atlas Network and from Cátedra Vargas Llosa, as members with “voice, but no vote.”

The year of its inauguration, Álvaro Vargas Llosa highlighted the importance of this project: “We want journalism, in its different manifestations, to be valued as a cultural category; and this award serves to stimulate young journalists to carry out this task without any reservations compared to other genres in the world of culture.”

The first edition was won by Cuban journalist Carla Gloria Colomé for a report published in the digital media El Estornudo, entitled: “El 11 de julio en San Antonio de los Baños: Lo que se ve / lo que no se ve,” where she chronicles the beginning of the youth protests that took Cuba by storm at the time. The second edition was awarded went to Mexican journalist Víctor Núñez Jaime, for "El segundo exilio de Sergio Ramírez,” a profile of the second exile under the Ortega dictatorship of Nicaraguan writer and politician (and a Cervantes Prize winner in 2018), which was published in Milenio. The third edition was won by Otoniel Ramírez, for his video exposé “Duele Respirar,” a telling television documentary by Fuerza Informativa Azteca on the brutality of the Ortega dictatorship in Nicaragua. The fourth version of the Award was won by the Mexican journalist Iñigo Arredondo, for his investigative documentary on arms trafficking in Mexico, entitled “las armas de Ovidio,” published in N+Focus.

For more information on the award convened by Atlas Network and the Cátedra Vargas Llosa please consult https://catedravargasllosa.org/inicio/index.php/premio-periodismo-joven/

The new entries can uploaded starting on May 21^st, 2025, and will close on Friday, October 24th, 2025.

The winner of the Young Journalism Prize 2025 will be announced in the forthcoming annual Festival de Escribidores, in Mexico City, on November 26^th, at the Universidad de la Libertad.

The winner will be also invited to participate in a short address on the winning topic in Atlas Network’s forthcoming Latin American Liberty Forum, to be held in late February 2026 in Lima, Peru.