Sonia Shah is an investigative journalist and author of critically acclaimed and prize-winning books on science, human-animal relations, and international politics. Her next book is "Special: The Rise and Fall of a Beastly Idea," awarded a 2023 Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant. Her most recent book, "The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move" (Bloomsbury, 2020), was a finalist for the 2021 PEN/E.O Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and 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.

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.  
She holds a B.A. in journalism, philosophy, and neuroscience from Oberlin College, and lives with molecular ecologist Mark Bulmer and has two sons, Zakir and Kush.

Photo copyright: Glenford Nuñez