{"id":285302,"date":"2025-01-20T12:00:04","date_gmt":"2025-01-20T12:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=285302"},"modified":"2025-01-16T09:37:44","modified_gmt":"2025-01-16T09:37:44","slug":"transcend-member-s-p-udayakumar-receives-the-2025-nuclear-free-future-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/01\/transcend-member-s-p-udayakumar-receives-the-2025-nuclear-free-future-award\/","title":{"rendered":"TRANSCEND Member S.P. Udayakumar receives 2025 \u2018Nuclear-Free Future Award\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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SP Udayakumar (left) who taught at the European Peace University in Stadtschlaining, Austria, with TMS editor Antonio C. S. Rosa, Vienna Airport 2008.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Nuclear-Free Future Awards, founded in 1998, honor the many heroes of the global anti-nuclear movement who work to rid the world of uranium mining, uranium munitions, nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The Award was originally managed by the Nuclear-Free Future Foundation in Munich, Germany and is now co-sponsored by Beyond Nuclear, USA, and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW).<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The 2025 awards will honor individuals from Brazil, Germany, India, Navajo country, the United States and Zimbabwe for their achievements in working for a nuclear-free world.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

14 Jan 2025 <\/em>– The Award laureates are chosen by an international jury of their peers and are offered in three categories: Resistance, Education and Solution. The 2025 laureates are: S.P. Udayakumar (India) for Resistance; M\u00e1rcia Gomes de Oliveira and Norbert Suchanek (Brazil \/ Germany) for Education; and Edwick Madzimure (Zimbabwe) for Solution.

Honorary Lifetime Achievement awards will be given to teacher, author and anti-nuclear activist,\u00a0Joanna Macy<\/strong>, and posthumously to Native American activist and musician,\u00a0 Klee\u00a0 Benally<\/strong>.

The Nuclear-Free Future Awards will be held on Tue 4 Mar 2025 at The Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City (7 E 7th St. NY NY.) A reception at 6pm will be followed by the awards ceremony starting at 7pm. Both events are free admission and open to the public. Media are welcome.

The Nuclear-Free Future Awards were founded by German journalist, filmmaker and activist,\u00a0Claus Biegert, in 1998 and were first held in Salzburg, Austria. Since then, the Awards\u00a0have traveled the world, honoring the largely unsung heroes of the Nuclear Age who work to end uranium mining and rid the world of nuclear weapons, nuclear power and uranium\u00a0munitions.

The event is a co-presentation of\u00a0Beyond Nuclear\u00a0and\u00a0International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Germany, an affiliate of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize-winning\u00a0organization\u00a0IPPNW.

The 2025 Awards event takes place during the\u00a0Third Meeting of States Parties\u00a0to the\u00a0Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons\u00a0March 3-7 at the United Nations.<\/p>\n

About the laureates:<\/h3>\n

S.P. Udayakumar <\/strong>is the TRANSCEND Network<\/a> South Asia Convenor, convenor of the People\u2019s Movement Against Nuclear Energy in India, and a committed advocate for environmental and social justice, with a focus on protecting vulnerable communities from the adverse impacts of nuclear energy. In particular, he helped galvanize and lead a grassroots movement in 2011 that involved thousands of local residents, fisherfolk and farmers, who challenged the construction of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in Tamil Nadu, India. Since then, he has worked tirelessly to raise awareness within communities all over southern India about the dangers of nuclear power, including radiation risks and ecological degradation.

M\u00e1rcia Gomes de Oliveira and Norbert Suchanek\u00a0<\/strong>are the co-founders of the\u00a0International Uranium Film Festival\u00a0which began in Rio de Janeiro in 2010 and has to date presented\u00a0more than 300 films in over 40 cities around the world covering a wide range of nuclear-related issues including uranium mining, nuclear waste, nuclear war and nuclear accidents. The\u00a0festival offers prizes and serves to connect filmmakers with each other and to other activists. Norbert Suchanek is a German-born journalist on human rights and environmental issues, a\u00a0writer and filmmaker. M\u00e1rcia Gomes de Oliviera is a Brazilian-born social scientist, educator and filmmaker.

Edwick Madzimure<\/strong>\u00a0of Zimbabwe\u00a0campaigns for the voices of women to be heard, especially in areas of militarism, nuclear weapons and climate change, given that women are\u00a0disproportionately harmed by wars and colonialist practices. Emerging from poverty and a family of artisanal miners, she became in 2016 the founding director of the Zimbabwe chapter\u00a0of\u00a0Women\u2019s International League for Peace and Freedom, a feminist centered\u00a0organization\u00a0now more than 100 years old. She participated in the First Meeting of States Parties to the\u00a0TPNW in Vienna in 2022 and has also spoken and led workshops at the COP conferences.

Klee Benally<\/strong>\u00a0was a\u00a0Navajo activist and musician\u00a0and member of the Navajo T\u00f3dich\u2019ii\u2019nii Clan and the Nakai Din\u00e9 Clan. In addition to a musical career with his siblings in the band\u00a0Blackfire, Klee was a passionate campaigner and filmmaker exposing the colonialist legacy of uranium mines and working for the cleanup of the more than 500 abandoned uranium\u00a0mines that continue to contaminate the Navajo reservation. A month before his death on December 30, 2023,\u00a0\u00a0Klee published his book,\u00a0\u201cNo Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in\u00a0Defense of the Sacred.\u201d Klee\u2019s award will be accepted on his behalf by his mother, Berta Benally.

Joanna Macy,<\/strong>\u00a0a deep ecologist and Buddhist scholar, began her anti-nuclear activism in the 1960s, leading to her hopeful 1983 book,\u00a0Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age\u00a0\u2014\u00a0published at the height of the Cold War. More recently, she has written, \u201cThe most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the\u00a0world\u2014we\u2019ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship with our world, with\u00a0ourselves and each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original – nuclearfreefutureaward.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

14 Jan 2025 – The Award laureates are chosen by an international jury in three categories: Resistance, Education and Solution. The 2025 laureates are: S.P. Udayakumar (India) for Resistance; M\u00e1rcia Gomes de Oliveira and Norbert Suchanek (Brazil \/ Germany) for Education; and Edwick Madzimure (Zimbabwe) for Solution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":44407,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[196],"tags":[1476,635,2298,2988],"class_list":["post-285302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-news","tag-nuclear-abolition","tag-nuclear-power","tag-nuclear-weapons-illegal","tag-treaty-on-the-prohibition-of-nuclear-weapons-tpnw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285302"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":285307,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285302\/revisions\/285307"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}