Katherine Boo

Katherine Boo is the author of the National Book Award winner for Nonfiction, the 2013 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award winner, and a 2013 Pulitzer finalist, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. In 2001, after many years spent exploring how people get out of poverty in the United States, she met Sunil Khilnani, an Indian writer and political historian. His country, which has one-third of the world’s poor and is also one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, became her country, too. Over time, moving between the U.S. and India, she came to feel that the style of reporting she practiced in America—a mix of intimate immersion and investigation—might have some value in India as well. From November 2007, when Katherine Boo first walked into Annawadi, until March 2011, when she completed her reporting, she documented the experiences of residents with written notes, video recordings, audiotapes, photographs, and thousands of public records.

A New York Times bestseller, Behind the Beautiful Forevers explores the hidden world of Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near Mumbai’s international airport. As India begins to prosper, the slum’s residents are electric with hope. Abdul, a diffident teenager, sorts and sells recyclable airport garbage with such deftness that he’s on the verge of taking his family of eleven out of the slums. Asha, a sharp and imaginative 39-year-old woman, is equally determined to make her sensitive daughter Annawadi’s first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like fifteen-year-old Kalu, a homeless scrap-metal thief, feel themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call the “Full Enjoy.”

But then Abdul is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terrorism and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy escalate and turn brutal. As the true contours of an unequal city are revealed, so too are the courage and ingenuity of the Annawadians. Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a beautifully written, rigorously researched, and intimately reported account of both a slum and a booming capital city where optimism, competition, anxiety, and volatility coexist uneasily, and moral imperatives can’t help but collide.

Katherine Boo, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has also published in the Washington Post, Washington City Paper, and The Washington Monthly. Her writing about disadvantaged populations has garnered numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and a MacArthur “Genius” Award.

Contact us to learn more about booking Katherine Boo for your next event.