Katherine Boo

Boo grew up in Washington D.C. and graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University. She honed her journalism skills working for Washington’s City Paper and the Washington Monthly. From 1993 to 2003, she wrote for the Washington Post as an editor and investigative journalist. In 2004, Boo officially joined the staff of The New Yorker after contributing articles for three years. Over the course of her career, Boo has won many awards for her work in areas of social justice and public service, including a Pulitzer, a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and the 2002 Sidney Hillman Award. Boo also won a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2002, funding Boo’s efforts to live and work in underprivileged and under-reported communities. Boo married Sunil Khilnani, a Professor of Politics at King’s College, London and a scholar of Indian history, and soon became consumed with reporting the stories in India that continue to go unnoticed as India’s quickly growing economy transforms the face of the country. Boo spent three years living in the Annawadi slum and later turned her observations there into the award-winning book Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Since 2008, Boo has split her time between India and America as she continues to write for The New Yorker about issues of inequality and economic opportunity in a globalizing world.