Katherine Boo is an American writer and journalist. A staff writer at the New Yorker, she has written extensively about disadvantaged communities in her native United States and, more recently, India. She won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2000 and was a award a Macarthur “genius” grant in 2002. Her first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum won the National Book Award in 2012. The novelist Amit Chaudhuri described it as “a small classic in contemporary writing.”