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
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.
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.
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.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust them.
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.
I think it's this congenital problem with journalism that we oversell the difference we make. We make small differences.
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.
A great deal of what is presumed to be intractable or inevitable in this world doesn't strike me that way at all.
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.
A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught
I'm useless when I meet writers I love - I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe.
In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down.
...much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.
My job is to lay it out clearly, not to give my policy prescriptions.Very little journalism is world changing. But if change is to happen, it will be because people with power have a better sense of what’s happening to people who have none.