A Guggenheim fellow in non-fiction and 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, has been featured on current affairs programs, including Democracy Now!, RadioLab, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and other NPR shows, as well as on CNN, Al Jazeera, and BBC, and  has been frequently supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and The Nation Investigative Fund.  Her new book, The Imaginary Wall: How we lost our kinship with animals, a winner of a Whiting Grant for Creative Nonfiction, is forthcoming in February 2027.

Shah has been honored as a OneHealth Champion by EcoHealth Alliance and with an honorary doctor in humanities from Oberlin College, where she delivered a commencement address.  Her TED talks on pandemics, migration and malaria have been viewed by over 1,000,000 around the world and she has lectured at universities and colleges across the country, including Columbia’s Earth Institute, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Georgetown and for international organizations including the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration and the European Commission. She has served as a judge for the National Book Awards in Non-Fiction and as an Ottaway Professor of Journalism at SUNY New Paltz.

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 Coronavirus 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 2010 book, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years (Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, July 2010), based on five years of 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.”

Shah’s 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. 

Buzzfeed listed her groundbreaking 1997 collection Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire on its “27 Books Everyone in America Should Read.“