Katherine Boo

Katherine Boo is an American journalist and author known for her long-form narrative journalism about poverty in America and India. She studied political science at Barnard College and worked for many years at The Washington Post, where she won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2000 for her reporting on the neglect and abuse of the mentally retarded in group homes. Her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2012) followed the lives of residents of Annawadi, a Mumbai slum beside the international airport. Boo spent years reporting in the slum, producing a work that reads like a novel while being entirely factual. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, the Pulitzer Prize finalist, and numerous other honors. Boo has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003. Her work is characterized by painstaking immersive reporting over long periods, deep ethical engagement with her subjects, and literary precision. She received a MacArthur 'Genius' Fellowship in 2002. Behind the Beautiful Forevers is widely taught in journalism and creative nonfiction programs as a model of narrative nonfiction at its highest level.