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
...much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.
A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught
One thing that was very clear to me is that the young people in a place like Annawadi aren't tripping on caste the way their parents are. They know their parents have these old views.
We often have an exaggerated sense of what nonprofits and governments are doing to help the poor, but the really inspiring thing is how much the poor are doing to help themselves.
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.
I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.
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 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.
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.
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?