A Conversation with Aisalkyn Samsalieva, Travel to Art Award 2025 Journalist of the Year
During Art Basel Miami Beach in December, the international Travel to Art Award named the people shaping the future of the creative economy. Its Journalist of the Year went to Aisalkyn Samsalieva — a journalist, writer, and researcher whose work over more than fifteen years has centered on women’s stories, migration, and the cultural identity of Central Asia. We spoke with her about what the recognition means, about her Turkic roots, about the journalist’s place in the age of artificial intelligence, and about what she hopes to pass on to a new generation of writers.
You were named Journalist of the Year at the 2025 Travel to Art Award. What does international recognition of your work mean to you, and what responsibility does it place on a journalist today?
What matters most is that it recognized an approach to the profession, not a single format. I’ve always seen journalism, literature, editing, and research as parts of one mission. Travel to Art treats journalism as part of culture and of the creative economy — a force that shapes how the public understands the world. That’s close to how I see my own work.
But recognition isn’t a finish line for me; it’s an obligation. What matters especially is that the award went to work about voices that usually stay on the margins: women, migrants, people living through cultural transitions. It confirms that these stories matter beyond any one region. And it raises the bar. I have to keep doing honest work — not flattening human experience into content that’s striking but hollow.
Many people outside the region first encountered your name through this award. In short, what work stands behind it?
More than fifteen years of returning to the same questions. Whose voice gets heard? Who goes unnoticed? What does a single story tell us about a society? For four years I wrote a column, Still Unpicked Flowers, where I could write honestly and carefully about women’s lives that rarely get treated as “important enough” for the news. That same sense of living between countries and languages is where my book We’re Not Locals came from — it’s about people who keep up an inner dialogue with memory and identity even years after settling somewhere new.
Alongside that, I’ve worked with figures from the arts. With the prima ballerina Asel Aidarova, for instance, I wanted to talk not about her biography but about the person behind the public image. And over time I’ve moved beyond writing itself — serving on competition juries, reviewing submissions for an academic journal. So the recognition reflects a whole body of work, not a single success.
One theme of the 2025 Travel to Art Award was Turkic heritage. How do your cultural roots and your Central Asian experience shape your work, your reading of social change, and your sense of what journalism is for?
My roots shape the lens, not the topics. Central Asia is often described from the outside, and when it is, the region gets flattened into a stereotype or a set of statistics. I write from inside the culture — with its language, its traditions, its contradictions, its emotional codes. Turkic and Central Asian heritage isn’t a backdrop for me; it’s a way of seeing. It means paying attention to memory, to family, to the place of women, to how a society lives through change.
At the same time, having lived and worked in several countries keeps me from getting stuck in the purely local. A regional story almost always turns out to be part of a larger conversation — about migration, identity, belonging. That’s why I think journalism from our part of the world has a global job to do: to show that these voices are full participants in the world’s conversation — intellectually, culturally, emotionally — and not figures at its edge.
Women’s stories and migration come up again and again in your work. Why those in particular?
Because in women’s stories, private life and public expectation almost always collide. In many societies — Central Asia among them — women carry an enormous emotional and family burden that’s rarely named out loud. I’m interested in them not as symbols but as individuals: with contradictions, ambitions, strength. When those stories are told honestly, a society starts to understand itself better.
Migration is tied directly to that. It’s one of the defining experiences of our time, especially for the former Soviet countries. Migrants usually get talked about in numbers — how many left, how much money they sent home. But behind the numbers are people trying to hold on to their dignity, their language, their culture. Migration doesn’t erase identity; it transforms it. A person carries several worlds at once. Those stories deserve serious attention, not pity.
Many observers argue that artificial intelligence is radically reshaping the media industry. How do you think the journalist’s role should change in the age of AI, and which qualities will stay uniquely human?
AI changes speed and production. It processes data faster, formats, summarizes, takes over the routine — and that’s fine; a journalist can use it as a tool. But it doesn’t replace what the profession is actually about. AI doesn’t sit beside the person who is finding the courage, for the first time, to tell a hard story. It carries no ethical responsibility for what gets published. It can’t feel where the line runs between honesty and doing harm.
So what stays uniquely human is trust, presence, and judgment — the ability to listen for a long time without simplifying. The instinct to ask not “what happened?” but “why is this happening, and whose voice is missing here?” I think a journalist’s value will be measured less and less by how much text they produce, and more and more by depth, precision, and responsibility. In a world drowning in content, meaning is what becomes scarce.
International bodies increasingly describe the creative economy as a key driver of global development. What place will journalists, writers, and other creators of intellectual content hold in the economy of the future?
The creative economy rests on trust and meaning, not on sheer volume — and that’s exactly what writers create. UNESCO and UNCTAD put the sector at almost $2.3 trillion a year, and behind those numbers are people who shape how a society understands itself. Journalists, writers, and creators of intellectual content are the layer where culture turns into value. They preserve memory, ask the questions, build the connections between people.
The risk, as I see it, is the temptation to flatten them into “content producers” measured by quantity and reach. If the future goes that way, it will hollow out the very thing the creative economy exists for. I believe in the opposite movement: the more production is automated, the more human authorship will be valued — the honest, deep, ethical kind. That’s what can’t be replaced.
Beyond your own writing, you also work as an expert — a competition juror and a reviewer for an academic journal. Why does a journalist need that second, analytical level?
Because journalism captures the moment, while research helps you see the system. When you stay with a subject for a long time, patterns start to surface behind the individual lives — social, cultural, linguistic. Evaluating other people’s work — whether entries in a competition like Akyl Tirek or an article submitted to a journal — is a different angle on the profession. You become responsible not just for your own text but for the standards others are held to.
That experience deepened my sense that journalism isn’t only about producing material. It’s also about keeping the level of the conversation high and supporting other people’s talent. And it leads me naturally toward research. I want to translate practical experience into scholarly form: migration, women’s identity, the representation of Central Asian and post-Soviet communities in the media. Journalism shows the lived experience; scholarship explains the patterns underneath it.
What do you most want to build on after this recognition?
I want to keep working across journalism, literature, and media research — especially on diaspora, women’s experience, and cultural memory. I’m also drawn to teaching: workshops on storytelling, interviewing, and writing. A lot of people carry powerful stories but don’t have the tools to tell them publicly, and that’s where you can help younger writers find their own voice.
A separate strand is academic publishing, along with new books and essays. These themes call for a long conversation, and I still have a great deal of material. It matters to me that Central Asian and diaspora stories live not only in the media but in the professional and scholarly record too.
Finally: if you could speak to young journalists, writers, and authors anywhere in the world, what idea or mission would you most want to pass on to them as a Travel to Art laureate?
I’d say this: find your voice, and turn it toward the people who usually go unheard. Strong work doesn’t begin with a topic that will go viral; it begins with a person whose story is worth keeping. Don’t chase the sensational. Chase precision, depth, and respect for the person you’re writing about. It’s slower, but it lasts.
And remember what it’s all for. Any society is made up not only of official events and public figures but also of quiet struggle, cultural memory, and voices at risk of vanishing. Journalism can keep them from vanishing — it can make invisible experience visible. If your work does even that, it already matters.
