Katherine Boo

Katherine Boo is an American investigative journalist who has spent her career reporting on poverty and how public systems fail — or fleece — the disadvantaged. A former editor and reporter at *The Washington Post*, where her exposé of abuse in group homes for the intellectually disabled won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2000, she became a staff writer at *The New Yorker* and received a MacArthur genius" fellowship in 2002. Married to the Indian-born scholar Sunil Khilnani, Boo began reporting in Mumbai in 2007, partly to test whether her document-driven methods could work outside the United States. *Behind the Beautiful Forevers*, her first book, won the 2012 National Book Award for Nonfiction, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and was adapted by David Hare into a stage production at Britain's National Theatre. Notably, Boo uses no composite characters and no changed names; everything in the book is drawn from witnessed events, recordings, and public records.