Andrea Freiermuth wins Imholz Sponsorship Award

The 40-year-old freelance journalist is the first winner of the only Swiss journalism prize that does not recognize a report that has already been published, but starts a few steps earlier: with the idea.
 
Andrea Freiermuth convinced the three-member jury, consisting of Oswald Iten (President Swiss Travelwriters Club), Sonja Hüsler (Board Member Swiss Travelwriters Clubs) and Christoph Ammann (Head of Travel Department Sonntagszeitung and STC founding member), with her concept of traveling from Quito in Ecuador to the Atlantic using various buses and boats. "I had the idea at the beginning of the year when I was traveling on the Rio Napo in Ecuador and the outboard motor broke down. A fellow traveler joked that we would now be like Francisco de Orellana, who took a year to get from the Andean highlands to the mouth of the Amazon in the 16th century. I imagined what the modern traveler would experience on such a long river journey," said Freiermuth in a statement. Today, the journey can be completed in a month, the journalist estimates.
 
Andrea Freiermuth has made a name for herself in recent years for her cycling and hiking reports. The Fricktal native has worked for the Aargauer Zeitung, the Berner Zeitung and the Beobacher Natur. She has recently started freelancing.
 
Together with Zurich travel pioneer Hans Imholz, the Swiss Travelwriters Club and the Sonntagszeitung are looking forward to the report that Andrea Freiermuth will be researching in the fall. Her text is expected to be published in the Sonntagszeitung in 2014.
 
More than 30 journalists applied for the Imholz Award. The range of ideas was broad, as was the variety of destinations: The Solomon Islands, Laos, Gabon, Ibiza or Greece were among them. The quality of the dossiers submitted was also high. The conditions of participation for the second edition of the Imholz Promotion Award will be communicated at the beginning of 2014.