Malak Abas

Reporter

Malak grew up in Winnipeg’s North End and spent her childhood living behind a convenience store her parents owned. Some of her earliest memories involve regular customers getting a kick out of the child sweeping floors, stocking shelves, or flipping through the stack of Free Press papers for sale.

Those years connecting with Winnipeg’s diverse community inspired a love of hearing and telling stories. That would come in handy later.

She attended the University of Manitoba, where she studied the uniquely dissimilar subjects of English literature and biology and was clearly unsure of what she wanted to do with her life until she walked into the campus student paper, the Manitoban, on a whim. She then promptly worked her way from a reporter to the publication’s editor-in-chief.

In 2020, after a copy-editing internship with Postmedia in Ontario and a long time immersed in campus news, Malak took on the most exciting job she’s had since those days behind a corner store counter: joining the Free Press, a paper she had sold after school, cut out comics from as a child, and enjoyed her entire life.

In the time since, she’s gained a crop of new grey hairs, a strange fondness for a rapidly looming deadline, and a 2021 National Newspaper Award nomination in the breaking news category she proudly shares with a fellow reporter and an editor.

When she’s not reporting on her hometown, Malak can be found catching a mid-day matinee whenever possible and fruitlessly attempting to replicate her mom’s Lebanese recipes.