Katherine Boo
Katherine Boo
Katherine "Kate" J. Boois an American investigative journalist who has documented the lives of people in poverty. She has won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the MacArthur "genius" award, and the National Book Award for Nonfiction. 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,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth12 August 1964
CountryUnited States of America
affluence highways income low people
We talk a lot about infrastructure in cities, and it's talking about highways and it's talking about trains, but I think more important to people who are low income is, how do I get from here to there? How do I become part of the affluence that's surrounding me?
feels nonfiction work
When your work is nonfiction about low-income communities, pretty much anything that's not nonfiction about low-income communities feels like a guilty pleasure.
dealing gives healthy illness life respect since
I have been dealing with illness and its manifestations since I was a teenager, and I think that gives me a very healthy respect for the things in life we can't control.
mumbai people places tale
People talk about places like Mumbai as a tale of two cities, as if the rich and poor don't have anything to do with each other.
i-love-him world
I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.
justice guilt bags
The Indian criminal justice system was a market like garbage, Abdul now understood. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags.
children blow doctors
Everyone in Annawadi talks like this: 'Oh, I will make my child a doctor, a lawyer, and he will make us rich'. It's vanity, nothing more. Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself, 'what a navigator I am!' And then the wind blows you east.
home heart men
Don't correct me, you don't have any rights over me." "What kind of life is this? So I sit at home , entirely dependent on this man, and then it turns out his heart was never with me. How is it possible to force someone to love me?
school government years
Rich Indians typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government. Private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one that gets out of the way. The attacks on the Taj and the Oberoi, in which executives and socialites died, had served as a blunt correction. The wealthy now saw that their security could not be requisitioned privately. They were dependent on the same public safety system that ill served the poor.
husband crazy years
I was spending a lot of time in Mumbai after I met my husband, who is Indian, and while parts of the city were prospering like crazy, I couldn't quite make out how the new wealth had changed the prospects of the majority of city residents who lived in slums. So after a few years I stopped wondering and started reporting.
people way merit
There's some way in which we would prefer not to see very clearly the immense gifts and intelligence of some of the people who live in our most abject conditions. Maybe there are some things at work in deciding who gets to be society's winners and who gets to be society's losers that don't have to do with merit.
drama stories medical
When I'm engaged in a story my health is not a big deal, but when I'm not doing anything, if you sit me down, I can get tied up in my own medical dramas. So I much prefer to work.
people never-trust said
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust them.
weed writing lakes
One chronicler writes of an area of India during the end of the 20th century: Almost no-one in this slum was poor by Indian benchmarks. ... True, a few residents trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner. A few ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake edge. And these individuals, miserable souls, thereby made an inestimable contribution to their neighbors. They gave those slum dwellers who didn't fry rats and eat weeds a sense of their upward mobility.