Alan Harper Bursary

The Alan Harper bursary is in memory of the Financial Times reporter/photographer who was killed in Kuwait in 1991, during the first Gulf War. Alan was with a colleague on April 24 near Ahmadi after driving their truck into a shallow pool of burning oil, apparently disoriented by smoke and spreading ground fires. Their vehicle was later struck by two other trucks, whose drivers were also disoriented by dangerous conditions, killing the journalists and three others.

The Alan Harper Bursary is awarded each year to enable the Young Photographer of the Year to undertake a major photographic project. The latest projects, by Young Photographer of the Year winners Cate Gillon (2004) and Kieran Dodds (2005) can be found below.

Kieran, from the Evening Times, Glasgow, returned to his academic roots for his Alan Harper Bursary project, a picture documentary of the migration of eight million African fruit bats (he graduated with an honours degree in zoology).

Kieran explains:
"I travelled to Kasanka National Park in north eastern Zambia near the border with Democratic Republic of Congo to document the great migration of around 8 million straw coloured fruit bats. I worked alongside researchers from the Universities of Florida and Aberdeen as they carried out pioneering work caught and satellite tagged the bats to follow their movements. The bats are attracted to a "big bang" of fruit that occurs in November/ December attracting animals from across the continent but no one yet knows where they go."

A selection of Kieran's Zambia images won him a coveted World Press Photo award for 2006; he won first prize in the Nature Story category.

Cate Gillon the Edinburgh Evening News Photographer named Diageo Young Photographer of the Year at the 2004 Awards, travelled to South East Asia to document life in the wake of the tsunami.

Funding for the project came from the Alan Harper Bursary, and her journey was made possible by Mercy Corps Scotland.