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Katherine Boo

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Nationality
  
American

Spouse
  
Role
  
Journalist


Name
  
Katherine Boo

Alma mater
  
Barnard College

Education
  
Barnard College

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Born
  
August 12, 1964 (age 59) (
1964-08-12
)

Occupation
  
investigative journalist

Known for
  
Books
  
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Untitled Boo 1/1

Nominations
  
Samuel Johnson Prize, Guardian First Book Award

Similar People
  
Sunil Khilnani, David Hare, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Aman Sethi, Rohinton Mistry

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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.

Contents

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Katherine boo


Life

Katherine Boo Katherine Boo Slum dweller Books The Guardian

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.

Career

Katherine Boo Katherine Boo on Her Book 39Behind the Beautiful Forevers

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.

Katherine Boo Katherine Boo wins US national nonfiction award for

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.

Another of Boo's New Yorker articles, "After Welfare", won the 2002 Sidney Hillman Award, which honors articles that advance the cause of social justice.

In 2002, Boo was a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. She won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002. She was also a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2010. (http://www.wiko-berlin.de/uploads/media/Wiko-JB-2009-10.pdf)

In 2012, Random House published Boo's first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, a non-fiction account of life in the Annawadi slums of Mumbai, India. It won the annual National Book Award for Nonfiction on November 14, 2012.

Awards

  • 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service
  • 2002 MacArthur Fellowship
  • 2002 The Hillman Prize
  • 2004 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing
  • 2012 Samuel Johnson Prize, shortlist, Behind the Beautiful Forevers
  • 2012 National Book Award (Nonfiction), Behind the Beautiful Forevers
  • 2012 Columbia Journalism Award
  • 2013 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, Behind the Beautiful Forevers
  • Books

  • Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. New York City: Random House (February 7, 2012). ISBN 978-1-4000-6755-8
  • References

    Katherine Boo Wikipedia