On 1 May 2008, Europe's seven photography publishers (Actes Sud, Apeiron, Dewi Lewis Publishing, Edition Braus, Lunwerg Editores, Mets&Schilt and Peliti Associati), convened in Manchester, bestowed the 15th Leica European Publisher's Award for Photography to Jacob Aue Sobol for his project entitled Tokyo.
 Jacob Aue Sobol was born in 1976 in Copenhagen, Denmark. He lived in Canada from 1994-1995, then in Greenland from 2000-2002, and has been resident in Tokyo since 2006.
 After studying at the European Film College, Jacob Aue Sobol enrolled in 1998 at Fatamorgana, the Danish school of documentary and art photography. There he developed the photographic language that would inform his images of Tiniteqilaaq, a settlement in eastern Greenland where he stayed in autumn 1999. For the next three years, he resided in this village in the home of his Greenlander girlfriend Sabine and her family, living the life of a fisherman and hunter. In 2004 he published Sabine, a book of photography and narrative that tells of how he met the young woman, and of their daily life on the east coast of Greenland. This book won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2005.
In summer 2005, Jacob Aue Sobol took a film crew to Guatemala to shoot a documentary about a young Maya girl's first trip to the ocean. The following year, he returned alone to the mountains of the country, spending a month with the indigenous Gomez-Brito family to document their everyday life. This project earned him a first prize at the World Press Photo 2006 (category: daily life stories).
Jacob Aue Sobol became a nominee at Magnum Photos in 2007.