Katherine Boo Biography
Katherine Boo is an American investigative journalist who has documented the lives of people in poverty. She has won the MacArthur “genius” award (2002) and the National Book Award for Nonfiction (2012), and her work earned the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for The Washington Post.
Katherine Boo 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.
Katherine Boo Age
Katherine Boo was born on August 12, 1964, in Washington, D.C., United States. She grew up in and around Washington, where her parents, both Minnesotans, moved when her father became an aide to Representative Eugene McCarthy. (The family name is Swedish, an Americanized version of Bö.) Katherine Boo is 54 years old as of 2019.
Katherine Boo Education
Katherine Boo attended T.C. Williams High School. She then joined Barnard College where he graduated with summa cum laude.
Katherine Boo graduated from Barnard in the late ’80s, still typing for The Columbia Daily Spectator, for which she wrote editorials and was hired by Jack Shafer, then the editor of the Washington City Paper.
Katherine Boo graduated from Barnard in the late ’80s, still typing for The Columbia Daily Spectator, for which she wrote editorials and was hired by Jack Shafer, then the editor of the Washington City Paper.
Katherine Boo Husband
Katherine Boo is married to Sunil Khilnani, a professor of politics and the director of the India Institute at King’s College London.
Katherine Boo Investigative journalist|Mumbai
Katherine 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, The Washington Post received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for Boo’s 1999 series about group homes for intellectually disabled people.
The Pulitzer judges noted that her work is “disclosed with 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, Katherine Boo 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, she 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. 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. For as long as she has been a writer, Ms. Boo has only wanted to write about the poor and the disadvantaged.
In 2000, while at The Washington Post, she won a Pulitzer Prize for a series about the mistreatment of the mentally retarded in the Washington area. “I think I grew up with a healthy respect for volatility, all the things you can’t control,” she said.
“And I became aware of the ways in which people who write about the disadvantaged often underestimate its psychological contours, the uncertainty economic or whatever.” She is a late bloomer and a prodigy.
Katherine Boo grew up in and around Washington, where her parents, both Minnesotans, moved when her father became an aide to Representative Eugene McCarthy. (The family name is Swedish, an Americanized version of Bö.)
After high school, by her own account a “confused late adolescent,” Ms. Boo took the civil service exam and became a clerk typist for the General Services Administration.
When she discovered she was ill, she quit and stayed at home for a while, just reading, and then went to night school while typing again, this time for the Federal Election Commission.
Katherine Boo graduated from Barnard in the late ’80s, still typing for The Columbia Daily Spectator, for which she wrote editorials and was hired by Jack Shafer, then the editor of the Washington City Paper.
Mr. Shafer, now a columnist for Reuters, said recently that he was impressed less by her writing than by her voluminous reading and her ability to think on her feet, and was amazed by how accomplished her first article was.
“Katherine Boo had the soul of a poet but the arm strength of an investigative reporter,” he recalled. Soon afterward he made Ms. Boo his No. 2, responsible not just for writing but also for editing the work of others, and from there she moved up the ladder to The Washington Monthly and then The Post,
where she became known for the way she combined investigative digging, on-the-street reporting, and brilliant writing. But she was never comfortable with interviewing official sources, she said and is still proud she has never had lunch with one. Unlike many journalists, Katherine Boo aspires to invisibility.
Katherine Boo hates publicity and talks about herself with about as much ease as someone trying to wriggle from a thicket stopping, pausing, retracing her sentences and looking for a better way out.
In her new book, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity,” the word “I” doesn’t appear until an author’s note on page 247, and by then it’s a little jarring.
One result is that “Beautiful Forevers,” a nonfiction account of the 3,000 or so people who live in Annawadi, a “sumpy plug of slum” on the outskirts of the Mumbai airport, reads almost like a novel: a true-life version of “Slumdog Millionaire” without the Bollywood ending.
The characters include various thieves and Dumpster divers; the neighborhood ward boss and her prized daughter, who is earning a college degree by rote, memorizing word for word the plots of “Mrs. Dalloway” and “The Way of the World”; and a man who makes a living of sorts by racing a carriage drawn by horses painted to look like zebras.
The plot turns on a seemingly petty feud in which a disgruntled woman sets herself on fire and then blames her neighbors, two of whom wind up jail, where they are brazenly extorted by a legal system that thrives on corruption.
Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of The New York Times who has written extensively about India, wrote in an e-mail message that “Beautiful Forevers” is “the best piece of reporting to come out of India in a half-century at least” and compared it to another groundbreaking book about poverty, George Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier.”
In her early visits to Annawadi, which began in 2007, Ms. Boo, who is small, blond and delicate looking and knew none of the half dozen or so languages spoken there, was anything but invisible.
There are, or used to be, two main landmarks in the slum: a concrete wall with ads for Italian tiles (“Beautiful Forever”) that give the book its title, and a foul-smelling sewage lake: a junk-rimmed pool of excrement, monsoon runoff, and petrochemicals.
While videotaping one day, Ms. Boo fell in, and when she came out her feet were blue. “At first it was a circus act,” she said in New York the other day. “It was, ‘Look at that crazy white woman!’ ”
But she spent so much time in Annawadi, reporting almost daily for four- or five-month stints over a span of four years, that eventually she became a fixture and was taken for granted. “The people got bored with me,” she said, “and they started laughing when others thought I was interesting.
I think some of them even felt sorry for me. In 2009 Ms. Boo wrote an article for The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 2003, describing the Mumbai premiere of “Slumdog Millionaire” and contrasting its lavishness with the lives of some of her slum dwellers.
The story was picked up and translated by a Marathi-language newspaper. This got her in hot water with the local police, who were irritated by her suggestion that they had covered up a murder of a young slum dweller, but also gave her credibility with the Annawadians.
“They saw that I was really doing what I said I was doing,” she said. “They saw that I even got the jokes.” Ms. Boo was introduced to Mumbai by her husband, Sunil Khilnani, a former Johns Hopkins University professor who spends part of every year there and thought she could write about India in a way less condescending than many Westerners.
Initially, she was hesitant: there was the language barrier, and also her shaky health. Since her late teens Ms. Boo, who is now 47, has suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and several related immunological disorders.
Katherine Boo walks a little slowly and sometimes has trouble with her eyes. Her fingers are gnarled and bent. That she is still able to type is owing in large part to a 2002 MacArthur grant, which helped pay for surgery on her right hand.
For someone in her condition, the best treatment is drugs that suppress the immune system, and these do not make such a person an ideal candidate for spending time in a slum where tuberculosis is practically epidemic.
But one night Ms. Boo tripped over an unabridged dictionary in her own apartment, puncturing a lung and breaking three ribs, and decided home wasn’t much safer. “I thought if I don’t work, I’m risking my mental health,” she said.
Katherine Boo Awards
- 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, The Washington Post, “notably for the work of Katherine Boo”
- 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
Katherine Boo Illness
Katherine Boo has suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and several related immunological disorders. She walks a little slowly and sometimes has trouble with her eyes. Her fingers are gnarled and bent.
Katherine Boo Books
- Behind the Beautiful Forevers 2012
- Untitled Boo 1/1 2004
Katherine Boo Twitter
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