The Sunday Times Magazine

None of the three cover stories we have entered for the awards are interviews with Hollywood film stars or pop idols (though we did those at other times). But two of them are interviews that went round the world. The tech businessman Mike Lynch insisted that the only person he wanted to interview him after being freed from house arrest in America was Danny Fortson, our man in San Francisco. Danny spent days in court watching proceedings, and that mattered to Mike Lynch. We published an astonishing interview from his Chelsea home this summer. Weeks later, he was dead, drowned off the coast of Sicily, and the interview went round the world once more.

Most of our readers hadn’t heard of Hannah Neeleman, but our interview with the Mormon “trad wife” in Utah is now the Times and Sunday Times most read article online ever. We tapped into a strange vein of TikTok subculture and it has had more than 2.5 million reads, generating upwards of 3,000 subscriptions. Its writer, Megan Agnew, had an interesting time versus the trolls after.

One of the most original and surprising stories we have ever worked on was brought to us by our chief interviewer, Decca Aitkenhead, who proved she is a brave and detailed feature writer, as well as last year’s winning interviewer. Sparking from a tip given to her on holiday in Jamaica, what unfurled was a terrifying and scarcely believable tale of abuse inside a school for “troubled” American boys. We’re proud to have brought this horror to light. Decca also wrote about sibling sexual abuse and the scourge of teens and phones for us - oh, and interviewed Chris Hoy and Angela Merkel.

We have brought plenty of new readers into the ST this year, through Jenny Kleeman’s expose of young people and cancer, Sian Griffiths on the pitfalls of homeschooling, and a fun Q&A on wine questions you've always been too embarrassed to ask (the older, male readers, for we like them too, had great fun in the comments on our Camra beer piece). Matt Rudd, Jeremy Clarkson and Charlotte Ivers are three of the wittiest columnists on their beats. Our expanded health and fitness coverage has proved a hit. And there's still room for the campaigning foreign reporting The Sunday Times Magazine has been renowned for for 60 years - see Christina Lamb’s return visit to the forgotten Yazidis.

It's all presented, in print and online, with original photography, smart headlines (yes that do well for SEO too) and with the writing as precise as can be. We think it's a magazine that always has something to say, or at least make you smile, at the weekend.