GREAT BRITAIN

Malcolm Linton is a British photographer based in Nairobi for the U.S. agency Black Star. He works mostly in Africa and the former U.S.S.R. for U.S. and European news magazines. Linton, 39, studied literature at university in England and the United States. He worked as a print and radio journalist in Latin America from 1982 to 1987 then as a news writer for the BBC in England before taking up photography full-time in 1989. He covered the El Salvador guerrilla offensive for Reuters in November 1989 and the U.S. invasion in December, when he was injured in crossfire. In 1990, he worked as Reuters' chief photographer in Nicaragua and then freelanced in England. At the end of 1990 he joined Sipa Press, covered Jordan during the Gulf War and moved to Moscow in 1991. For the next three years he traveled all over the former Soviet Union and shot stories in Yugoslavia, Thailand and the Philippines. He joined Black Star in late 1992 and moved to Nairobi in mid-1994, from where he has covered stories in Yemen, Zaire, Sudan, Rwanda and Burundi. Linton is best known for his coverage of war and civil unrest in former Soviet Georgia and Tajikistan as well as the ongoing political crisis in Russia, with wide exposure for his pictures of clashes of October 1993, when he was again injured. In the 1994 Pictures of the Year (University of Missouri) contest he won first prize in the portrait category for his shot of a Georgian soldier in combat in Abkhazia and was runner-up for the Canon Photo Essay of the Year award for his story "Georgia at War."