Katherine Boo to woo Fairway GLF audiences

Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Katherine “Kate” J. Boo will be among the renowned writers gracing the upcoming Fairway Galle Literary Festival 2017. 

Known for having documented the lives of people in poverty, Boo won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in the year 2000, the MacArthur “genius” award in 2002, and the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2012. 

A staff writer for the New Yorker magazine since 2003, Boo’s 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.

Having started her career in journalism with writing and editing positions at Washington’s City Paper and then the Washington Monthly, Boo joined the Washington Post, where she worked from 1993 to 2003, first as an editor of the Outlook section and then as an investigative reporter.

When she won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2000 for her series for the Post about group homes for intellectually disabled people, the Pulitzer judges noted that her work “disclosed wretched neglect and abuse in the city’s group homes for the intellectually disabled, which forced officials to acknowledge the conditions and begin reforms.” One of her 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 14 November 2012.

For the Fairway GLF, please contact: Colombo Box Office - 0717 040011; Galle Box Office - 0717 020011.