Nearly 50 years after the iconic photo of her running from a bombing raid was taken, Phan Thi Kim Phuc has earned Germany's Dresden award for her support of UNESCO and children wounded in war.
The award, established in 2010, includes an approximate US$11,000 in prize, and is given to honor "the brave, the tolerant, the humane from all over the world." Phuc was nine years old when a napalm bomb was dropped on her village in 1972. As she was fleeing the explosion, Associated Press photographer Nick Ut captured a shot of the scene, producing one of the world's most iconic images in the 20th century.
Phuc, now 55 and living in Canada, established a fund to build schools, orphanages and healthcare facilities worldwide. Her most recent work involves setting up libraries in her hometown of Trang Bang in Tay Ninh Province. In 2015, she traveled to the United States to receive treatment to address the effects of the chemicals that burned her in 1972.
The Nick Ut photo, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 and became a powerful anti-war symbol across the world, recently sold for US$11,700 at a charity auction to an unnamed Vietnamese businessman in 2015.
[Photo via Framed Network]
