Katherine Boo
| Katherine Boo | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 12, 1964 |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Barnard College |
| Occupation | investigative journalist |
| Known for |
Pulitzer Prize for Public Service; MacArthur Fellow, National Book Award for Nonfiction |
| Spouse(s) | Sunil Khilnani |
Katherine "Kate" J. Boo (born August 12, 1964) is an American investigative journalist who has documented the lives of people in poverty. She has won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service (2000), the MacArthur "genius" award (2002), and the National Book Award for Nonfiction (2012). She has been a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine since 2003. Her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity won nonfiction prizes from PEN, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in addition to the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Boo was reared in and near Washington, D.C. and was graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College of Columbia University. She is married to Sunil Khilnani, a professor of politics and the director of the India Institute at King's College London.
Boo began her career in journalism with writing and editing positions at Washington's City Paper and then the Washington Monthly. From there she went to the Washington Post, where she worked from 1993 to 2003, first as an editor of the Outlook section and then as an investigative reporter.
In 2000, her series for the Post about group homes for intellectually disabled people won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. The Pulitzer judges noted that her work "disclosed wretched neglect and abuse in the city's group homes for the intellectually disabled, which forced officials to acknowledge the conditions and begin reforms."
In 2003, she joined the staff of The New Yorker, to which she had been contributing since 2001. One of her subsequent New Yorker articles, "The Marriage Cure," won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2004. The article chronicled state-sponsored efforts to teach poor people in an Oklahoma community about marriage in hopes that such classes would help their students avoid or escape poverty.
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