Yemeni journalist and activist Tawwakul Karman was one of three 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winners announced today. The other winners were Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who is up for re-election next week, and Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee.

Founder of the activist group Women Journalists Without Chains (WJWC), Karman has found herself in jail on several occasions since she began organising weekly protests against the regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2007. The reason: the government refused WJWC a license to print their publication, according to a profile in the Yemen Times last year.

Last year, Karman survived an assassination attempt after fellow protestors intervened against a woman wielding a traditional Yemeni dagger, the UK’s Telegraph news website said.

As Arab Spring protests spread to Yemen, Karman was detained for two days in January, received threats, and has been subjected to a smear campaign in some media, reports said. Despite being targeted, she has remained steadfast in her demands for the resignation of President Saleh, and democratic reform.

Karman is a member of the Islamist opposition party Islah, whose leader Abdul Majeed al Zindani has been accused by the United States of links to Al-Qaeda. But Karman chose to stop veiling her face in 2004, the Yemen Times reported, and has been criticized by fellow Islah members for campaigning against child marriage and for women’s rights.

She told the BBC Arabic Service: “I’m so happy with the news of this prize and I dedicate it to all the martyrs and wounded of the Arab Spring …  in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Syria and to all the free people who are fighting for their rights and freedoms.”

But as the crowning of a new Nobel Laureate gives hope to other activists fighting for reform elsewhere in the Arab world, violence in Yemen has escalated since the return of President Saleh over a week ago.

Two journalists lost their lives in the recent violence, according to watchdog group Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Abdel Hakim Al-Nour, who worked for the Mas production company as a cameraman and producer, and who the New York Times said was a freelance photographer, was reportedly killed during the bombing of Taiz city on 4 October. Reporter Abdel Majid Al-Samawi died on 3 October from a sniper wound he had received eight days earlier, RSF said.

Five journalists have now been killed so far this year in Yemen, according to figures in the IPI DeathWatch. Yemen and Libya share the dubious honour of being the second most deadly country for journalists in the Middle East and North Africa, after Iraq, where nine journalists have been killed this year.