Journalist and Author

Sonia Shah is a journalist, a 2024 Guggenheim fellow, and author of The Next Great Migration: the beauty and terror of life on the move (2020); Pandemic: tracking contagions from cholera to Ebola and beyond (2017), and The Fever: How malaria has ruled humankind for 500,000 years (2010) among others. Her bylines appear in the New York Times magazine, the New Yorker, the Nation and elsewhere. Her new book, Special: the Rise and Fall of a Beastly Idea, winner of a 2023 Whiting Grant for Creative Nonfiction, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.

Her 2020 book, The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, explores our centuries-long assumptions about human and animal migration through science, history, and reporting, predicting its lifesaving power in the face of climate change. A finalist for the 2021 PEN/E.O Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, it was selected as a best nonfiction book of 2020 by Publishers Weekly, a best science book of 2020 by Amazon, a best science and technology book of 2020 by Library Journal, and a Tata Literature Live! finalist for the best book of the year. Author and activist Naomi Klein calls it a “dazzlingly original picture,” “rich with eclectic research and on-the-ground reporting,” and a “story threaded with joy and inspiration.”

Sonia’s 2016 book, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond–available in August 2020 with a new preface–has been called “superbly written,” (The Economist) , “bracingly intelligent” (Nature),  “provocative” and “chilling,” (New York Times), a “lively, rigorously researched and highly informative read,” (Wall Street Journal) and “absorbing, complex, and ominous,” (Publishers Weekly). It was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and as a finalist for the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in science/technology, the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society Award.

Her 2010 book, The Fever, which was called a “tour-de-force history of malaria” (New York Times), “rollicking” (Time), and “brilliant” (Wall Street Journal) was long-listed for the Royal Society’s Winton Prize. Her writing on science, politics, and human-animal relations has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Nation, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American and elsewhere and has been featured on CNN, RadioLab, Fresh Air, and TED.com, where her talk, “Three Reasons We Still Haven’t Gotten Rid of Malaria” has been viewed by over 1,000,000 people around the world.

Click here to subscribe to Sonia’s list.

“Investigative science journalist Shah (The Fever, 2011) is at it again, and if the words, and beyond, in her latest book’s subtitle don’t grab a reader’s attention, they should…Yes, Shah is back and in rare form. And this time it’s personal.” –Starred review of Pandemic from Booklist