Background
Boo grew up in and near Washington, District of Columbia
Boo grew up in and near Washington, District of Columbia
And was graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College of Columbia University.
She has been a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine since 2003. Boo is married to Sunil Khilnani, a professor of politics and the director of the India Institute at King"s College London. Boo began her career in journalism with writing and editing positions at Washington"s City Paper and then the Washington Monthly.
From there she went to the Washington Post, where she worked from 1993 to 2003, first as an editor of the Outlook section and then as an investigative reporter.
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."
In 2003, she joined the staff of The New Yorker, to which she had been contributing since 2001. 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.
In 2002, Boo was a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. In 2006, a Haniel Fellowship provided her with a half year of housing at the Hans Arnold Center, located at the American Academy in Berlin.
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:, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, a non-fiction account of life in the Annawadi slums of Mumbai, India.