Ottavia Spaggiari

@OttaviaS

Ottavia Spaggiari is an investigative journalist and long-form writer. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The New Yorker, Slate, The New Humanitarian and others. She has been fellow at Columbia Journalism School’s Global Migration Project and a recipient of the Investigative Journalism for Europe grant. From development aid to migration issues, from gender-based violence to police brutality, Ottavia has covered a wide range of topics, reporting from several European countries, sub-Saharan Africa and the US. Her feature on human traffickers' impunity in Italy came runner-up at the 2021 European Press Prize in the “distinguished reporting" category. She received her Master of Arts in Politics and Global Affairs from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where she was a San Paolo fellow.

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Reporting

| Olga Loginova, Ottavia Spaggiari

Telling the stories of brutality – reporting on political prisoners in Belarus

Constructing a long-form feature to document the narratives of Belarusians imprisoned for protesting after the 2020 presidential election was a pain-staking, months-long task fraught with danger   For almost three decades of Lukashenko’s rule, Belarusians…
| Olga Loginova, Ottavia Spaggiari

‘We have one enemy’: The Belarusians who oppose the Ukraine war

Just before dawn on February 24, Marina, a 33-year-old IT specialist from Belarus, woke up in her Kraków apartment. She’d been having a nightmare. She noticed that her husband, Alexey, was not sleeping either. He…
| Olga Loginova, Ottavia Spaggiari

‘Walking reminders of atrocities’

To this day, Nina* blames herself for taking her boyfriend Alex* to the protest in downtown Minsk. It was the evening of August 9, 2020, and earlier that day, the 25-year-olds had voted in their…
| Olga Loginova, Ottavia Spaggiari

L’annessione silenziosa

Un reportage dalla Bielorussia, dove l’autoritarismo di Lukashenko produce repressione, esilio, torture. Con il sostegno decisivo di Putin Marina ha trentatré anni, una doppia laurea in economia e ingegneria, tre gatti e un marito. È…