A depressing email reached my inbox last week: the Lettre Ulysses prize for literary reportage, worth $50,000 (£25,000), will not be presented in 2007 because the organisers have not been able to find a financial sponsor since its contract with Aventis came to an end last year.
The prize is particularly dear to my heart because last year I won it. I was presented with the cheque for my book - The People on the Street: A Writer's View of Israel - by Ryszard Kapuscinski, perhaps the greatest practitioner of literary reportage. Previous winners had included Anna Politkovskaya who received the 2003 prize for her examination of the Russian-Chechnyan conflict. Her international reputation didn't protect her from being murdered in Moscow in October 2006.
As we sat at the ceremony in Berlin last October, chaired by Isabel Hilton, the editor of the political website Open Democracy, the finalists were able to enjoy the pleasure of the company of those who had braved great danger and at great personal cost found their stories. I was next to Juanita León, whose book País de plomo: Crónicas de guerra (Country of Bullets: War Diaries) is a detailed portrait of the victims and protagonists of Colombia's deadly armed conflict. In it, she describes the suffering of the rural population, the ravages of the death squads, the incompetence of the government, the conflicts between the army, the leftwing guerrillas and the paramilitaries, the role of the drug economy and the increasing loss of humanity.
On my left was the Nepalese writer Manjushree Thapa. Her book Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy describes her journey to the remote, Maoist-held, mountainous western region. It was published just weeks before the royal coup in Nepal in 2005, and she was forced to flee the country and live in exile. Other books on the shortlist cover globalisation in the cotton industry, the adulteration of food in China and the Roma in Austria.
It was a vast surprise to me to be awarded this prize by the 10-member international jury of journalists; astonishing that a book entirely about Israelis should win such an award. But at the press conference the day after the official ceremony, one of the judges, Gamal al-Ghitany, editor of the Egyptian literary weekly Akhbar al-Adab (who, he told me, had been my book's champion from the first meeting), said that he had great fear about the clash of civilisations; that if east and west closed their minds to each other, both societies were doomed.
The development of the blogosphere and the massive increase in comment and analysis at the expense of reporting contributes on the one hand to the development of democracy and freedom of speech, on the other to a cheapskate approach to the rest of the world we live in. It is easy to develop opinions about people you have never met, who live thousands of miles away, who are assumed, because of their governments, to think and feel what you believe they think and feel. People become shapes you can fill with your own slogans: Israelis are Zionist colonialists; Palestinians are Islamist terrorists.
The value of reportage is that it requires the writer to leave the house, to observe and to listen. It is an empirical trade. The "truth" turns out to be messy, complex and contradictory. Great reportage moves away from political principles to the heart of humanity and its struggle to be free, to the conflicting and competing demands of the personal dilemmas we face day by day in our families, and the constraints of our external situation.
Looking back over 20 years of journalism, it's not the comment pieces I read that I remember, but the journeys I went on: to Vietnam in 1989, where I discovered a ravaged land, a disappointed freedom fighter from the tunnels of Co Chi, who showed me her medals and told me how she wished she had had a pretty dress in her youth, and a young population thirsty for western music and Coca Cola. I remember the many Roma houses I entered in the Czech Republic, and how every one dispelled the prevailing view of the general population that "gypsies are dirty". I remember the Turkish police, who shadowed our every move in the closed Kurdish city of Haniyeh, which the government was proposing to dam. I remember the Israeli couple sitting in the Saturday morning sunshine outside a cafe in Haifa remembering their time as slave labourers in Ukraine during the war, and how they met in an Italian displaced persons camp.
Comment and blogging can have the effect first of depersonalising events, then dehumanising them. The welcome addition of the informed blogger reporting first-hand from inside a war zone, as Salam Pax did during the Iraq war, takes power away from the supposed objectivity of the reporter and gives us the raw subjectivity of personal experience.
But literary reportage is more than that. Unlike comment, its passion is not for ideas but for directly observed reality. It brings to bear on what it sees not only its own subjectivity but also its range of experience beyond the immediate situation. The great practitioners of reportage - Kapuscinski, Martha Gelhorn, James Cameron, George Orwell in his Homage to Catalonia - created enduring and eloquent works of literary excellence. We read them not only to learn about Iran, Spain, South Africa, but about human nature itself: its cruelty, idealism, passions, despair, lust for power, courage and tragedy.
With all due respect to the hundreds of bloggers on Comment is free and the thousands of those who comment on their pieces, for all the passionate clash of ideas that is provoked, literary reportage is the greater form. And it is dying, asphyxiated by an online community of, mainly, amateurs who require no payment, no plane ticket, no hotel room to express what they think they know about this huge tragicomedy of ours.
