Winners of the Marai Photo Grant 2025 announced

After a three-year break, the winners of the Marai Photo Grant 2025 have been announced.

Organised by Agence France-Presse (AFP), the grant honours Shah Marai, former chief photographer at AFP’s Kabul bureau, who was killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul on 30 April 2018, at the age of 41. Marai was a 22-year veteran of the agency.

Previously known as the Marai Photo Award, the Photo Grant has been renamed, and for 2025 had a new theme: My Reality. Now.”, spotlights one of the most pressing issues of our time — climate change.

The two winners, Shefali Rafiq and Muhammad Amdat Hossain, are set to receive a grant and the opportunity to develop a proposed project, with mentorship from an AFP photographer.

Additionally, their final work will be published by AFP.

Shefali Rafiq will cover the story of how a water crisis is forcing India's young girls out of school, while Muhammad Amdat Hossain will cover the growing drinking water crisis in the climate-vulnerable coastal regions of southern Bangladesh.

You can read a posthumous report from Marai about the extreme danger he faced as a photojournalist in Afghanistan, here.