Katherine Boo | Granta

Katherine Boo

Katherine Boo is an investigative journalist focusing on matters of poverty and opportunity. A contributor to the New Yorker magazine since 2001, she was previously a reporter and editor at the Washington Post. Among the honours her work has received are a MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Grant, a National Magazine Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. This, her first book, won the 2012 National Book Award for Non-Fiction and the PEN/Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Publications

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Katherine Boo

Annawadi is a slum at the edge of Mumbai Airport, in the shadow of shining new luxury hotels. Its residents are garbage recyclers and construction workers, economic migrants, all of them living in the hope that a small part of India’s booming future will eventually be theirs. But when a crime rocks the slum community and global recession and terrorism shocks the city, tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy begin to turn brutal. As Boo gets to know those who dwell at Mumbai’s margins, she evokes an extraordinarily vivid and vigorous group of individuals flourishing against the odds amid the complications, corruptions and gross inequalities of the new India.