Posted: 7 September 2012
from Magazine Guernica, Emily Brennan interviews Katherine Boo
While covering poverty and social welfare for the Washington Post in 1993, Katherine Boo was commissioned to write a magazine profile of the new vice president, Al Gore. For most reporters, such an assignment would signal entry into the big leagues.
Social issues are regarded as a beat journalists cover until they are deemed important enough to interview politicians, bureaucrats, people of power.
“In journalism, if you get to be really hot stuff, that’s where you get to go—to the White House!” Boo told The Guardian in June. “And that’s too bad,” she added, “social issues are kind of worthy things that people graduate from.”
As soon as she handed in the assignment, Boo returned to the streets, precincts, churches, and shelters where she continued her reporting on low-income communities. She went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2000 for a Post series on government-run group homes for mentally retarded people. The investigation showed how much Boo, far from being uninterested in power, was a great student of it.
In her first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Boo turns her attention to India and the residents of Annawadi, a Mumbai slum in the shadows of the city’s airport and luxury hotels. Of Annawadi’s three thousand residents, few have full-time employment. Most sleep in homes of nailed-together scrap metal, plywood, and plastic tarpaulin; some sleep outside. Many children are forced to work instead of attend school. The dwelling’s eastern edge borders a vast pool of sewage.
To read the whole interview, click here.