The Guardian's Donald McRae has been named Interviewer of the Year in the prestigious SJA British Sports Journalism awards for the second year running.
He won the coveted prize for his incomparable weekly interviews, with the judges hailing "another superb year. He gets to the biggest names and gets the hardest line out of them every time." McRae stood out, they said, "because he delivers compelling, often electrifying, intros to command the reader's attention".
In 2010, his interviews included global stars such as Usain Bolt, Samuel Eto'o, Maria Sharapova and Sebastian Vettel, and revealing and emotional interviews with British names such as Lewis Hamilton, Lee Westwood, John Higgins and Graeme Swann. A full archive of McRae's interviews can be found here.
Paul Hayward, who writes across both Guardian and Observer, was twice highly commended for his work over the past year, in the Sportswriter of the Year and Columnist of the Year categories at the UK Sport-sponsored awards. The Guardian's cricket correspondent Mike Selvey was also highly commended for his writing on spot-fixing and the Ashes.
The Guardian was runner-up to the Times in the new and keenly contested Sports Newspaper of the Year category after a busy year covering events such football's World Cup, the Ashes and the Ryder Cup.