[7][8] During 2013 he worked as a freelance journalist in Cuba, supported by a scholarship from the Heinz Kühn Foundation [de] of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

[4] The award given by Reporterpreis to Relotius in 2018 was for "Best Reportage", delivered in Berlin in early December,[12][13][14] for a story of "unprecedented lightness, density and relevance, which never leaves open the sources on which it is based".

[15] He was the German-language CNN "Journalist of the Year" in 2014 for a story written for the Swiss magazine Reportagen[9][16] and won the European Press Prize in 2017.

[17] Reporting for which he was nominated or won prizes include articles about Iraqi children kidnapped by the Islamic State, a Guantánamo Bay inmate, and Syrian orphans from Aleppo who ended up as child slaves in Turkey.

[18][19] In 2017, Der Spiegel sent Relotius to Fergus Falls, Minnesota, for three weeks to write an article about Donald Trump supporters "to give readers better insight into Americans".

[28][29] About a year earlier, two residents of Fergus Falls, Minnesota – Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn – suspected that Relotius' portrayal of their hometown was inaccurate.

[21] Richard Grenell, the US ambassador to Germany, wrote to the magazine, complaining about an anti-American institutional bias (Anti-Amerikanismus) and asked for an independent investigation.

[40] The 2022 film A Thousand Lines, directed by Michael "Bully" Herbig and starring Jonas Nay and Elyas M'Barek, was inspired by Moreno's book and is a fictionalised interpretation of the case.

The laudatory speech said that he talked about social problems in a "poetic way" and that he succeeded in "creating images in the reader’s head that play like a film."