Katherine Boo

Katherine J. "Kate" Boo (born August 12, 1964) is an American investigative journalist who has documented the lives of people in poverty. She has received the MacArthur Fellowship, the National Book Award for Nonfiction (2012), and her work earned the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for The Washington Post. 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.

Early life and education Boo grew up in and near Washington, D.C., after her Minnesotan parents relocated there due to her father's appointment as an aide to Representative Eugene McCarthy. The family's surname, of Swedish origin, was Americanized to Boo from the original Bö.

Boo is married to Sunil Khilnani, a professor of politics and history at Ashoka University, India.

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.

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.

In 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025, Boo served as a judge for the American Mosaic Journalism Prize.

Awards 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, The Washington Post, "notably for the work of Katherine Boo" 2012 National Book Award (Nonfiction), Behind the Beautiful Forevers 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).