Esther Htusan

Esther Htusan (Burmese: အက်စသာထုဆန်) is a Kachin journalist from Myanmar, former Foreign Correspondent for the Associated Press based in Yangon, Myanmar. She was the first person from Myanmar to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 2016. In November 2017 she left the country after receiving death threats from supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Esther Htusan was born in 1987 in Phakant, Kachin State, Myanmar to ethnic Kachin parents Hkangda Dut La, a deacon at Hpakant Kachin Baptist Church, and his wife Bawmli Hkawn Shawng, a school teacher. She is the second youngest of six siblings. At the age of 10, she was sent to Myitkyina to live with an aunt. She graduated high school from Basic Education High School No. 3 Myitkyina and later she then enrolled at the Myitkyina University, where she received her B.Sc. in Mathematics in 2008. After graduating from the university and experiencing civil war in the region, she moved to Yangon in 2009 to study English and political science.

In 2012, she began her journalism career by working as a freelance producer, fixer and translator for international news agencies covering the parliamentary by-elections. In 2013, she joined the Associated Press as a reporter. Since then, she has been relentlessly pursuing stories about human rights abuses in Myanmar following a half-century of dictatorship. She has reported on the plight of the Rohingyas, who are Muslims living in the Rakhine State in the country's western shore but are denied Myanmar citizenship.

Esther earned her first Pulitzer Prize in 2016 as part of the AP reporting team, along with Martha Mendoza, Margie Mason, and Robin McDowell, that exposed the use of forced labor in the fishing industry in Southeast Asia and its connections to seafood sales in the United States. This was the AP’s first Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in its history.

The investigation centered on the tiny Indonesian island of Benjina, where men from Myanmar were enslaved, held in cages, and forced to fish. The AP journalists talked to over 40 current and former slaves on the island, used satellites to track a ship that carried slave-processed fish from the island to a port in Thailand and followed trucks carrying the fish to factories. "We were able to search and find the companies in Thailand that were then shipping to the United States," Mendoza told PBS NewsHour, "and go to these American seafood distributors to figure out where their fish ends up." The reporters eventually tracked the fish to major retailers in the United States from Wal-Mart to Whole Foods. The reporting process took over 18 months and the reporters faced dangers from mafia gunmen to angry fishing company officials.

The expose by Esther and the AP team, titled "Seafood from Slaves". Their investigation traced the supply chain from fishing companies to supermarkets and pet food providers in the U.S., ultimately freed more than 2,000 slave fishermen and led to several arrests, the seizure of ships worth millions of dollars and a bigger push for better transparency from food suppliers, including the introduction of legislation in the U.S. Congress.

On Octobrr 21, 2015, their reports "Seafood from Slaves" won the Oliver S. Gramling Award, the highest staff honor of the Associated Press. In November 2015, Arizona State University's the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism awarded Esther and her team with the Barlett & Steele Awards for Investigative Business Journalism award for their investigative reporting. Their work also earned them the 2016 Gerald Loeb Award for Investigative business journalism.