“Shah [tackles] with compassion and insight a deeply complex and challenging subject……her work addresses issues of fundamental importance to the survival and well-being of us all.”
New York times book review
Sonia Shah is an investigative journalist and author of critically acclaimed and prize-winning books on science, human-animal relations, and international politics. Her 2020 book, The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, a finalist for the 2021 PEN/E.O Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, was selected as a best nonfiction book of 2020 by Publishers Weekly, a best science book of 2020 by Amazon, and a best science and technology book of 2020 by Library Journal. Her New York Times magazine article, “How far does wildlife roam,” was included in the collection, Best American Nature and Science Writing 2022. Her 2016 book, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond 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 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 critically acclaimed 2010 book, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years (Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, July 2010), which is based on five years of original reportage in Cameroon, Malawi, Panama and elsewhere, was called a “tour-de-force” by the New York Times,” and was long-listed for the Royal Society Winton Prize. Philanthropist Bill Gates called it one of his top four “good books on disease” in recent years.
Shah’s prize-winning 2006 drug industry exposé, The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World’s Poorest Patients (New Press), was described by Publishers Weekly as “a tautly argued study…a trenchant exposé…meticulously researched and packed with documentary evidence,” and as “important [and] powerful” by The New England Journal of Medicine. The book, which international bestselling novelist and The Constant Gardener author John Le Carré called “an act of courage,” has enjoyed wide international distribution, including French, Japanese, and Italian editions.
Her 2004 book, Crude: The Story of Oil (Seven Stories), was acclaimed as “brilliant” and “beautifully written” by The Guardian and “required reading” by The Nation, and has been widely translated, from Japanese, Greek, and Italian to Bahasa Indonesia.
“Sonia Shah flipped my conception of cause and effect, and how we may need to change the focus of public health and medical interventions.” –Leana Wen, former president of Planned Parenthood, former Health Commissioner for the City of Baltimore
A former writing fellow of the Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation, Shah’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Nation, Foreign Affairs, and elsewhere, and has been featured on current affairs programs around the United States, including Democracy Now!, RadioLab, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and other NPR shows, as well as on CNN, Al Jazeera, and BBC. Selected as a 2023 OneHealth Champion by EcoHealth Alliance, Shah is a popular public speaker. Her TED talk on malaria has been viewed by over 1,000,000 around the world; she delivered the opening talk at the 2014 TEDMED conference and she has lectured at universities and colleges across the country, including Columbia’s Earth Institute, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Georgetown and elsewhere. She served as a judge for the 2023 National Book Awards in Non-Fiction and as the 2014 Ottaway Professor of Journalism at SUNY New Paltz and has been frequently supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and The Nation Investigative Fund. Buzzfeed listed her groundbreaking 1997 collection Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire on its “27 Books Every Woman in America Should Read.“
Shah was born in 1969 in New York City to Indian immigrants. Growing up, she shuttled between the northeastern United States where her parents practiced medicine and Mumbai and Bangalore, India, where her extended working-class family lived, developing a life-long interest in inequality between and within societies. She holds a BA in journalism, philosophy, and neuroscience from Oberlin College, and lives with molecular ecologist Mark Bulmer and has two sons, Zakir and Kush.
