Biography

Nicholas D. Kristof Biography

Nicholas D. Kristof (born 1959) grew up on an Oregon sheep and cherry farm. After graduating with honors from Harvard University, he went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, again graduating with honors. Kristof traveled the world as a young backpacker and, later, as a renowned international reporter for the New York Times, which he joined in 1984. At the Times, Kristof covered economics and politics. With his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, Kristof won his first Pulitzer Prize in journalism for his reporting on the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in Beijing, China. His second Pulitzer Prize honored his reporting on the genocide in Darfur, in the African nation of Sudan.  

Beginning in 2001, Kristof wrote regular columns for the Times, and at times he was unstinting in his critiques of American policies he thought misguided. He wrote about his opposition to the Iraq War and his belief that the United States would lose the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban. Many of his columns for the newspaper focused on global health issues, as well as poverty and gender issues in the Global South. Before writing Half the Sky, Kristof and WuDunn penned China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (1994) and Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia (2000). In 2021, he left the Times to run for governor of his home state of Oregon, but his candidacy was denied because he was no longer an Oregon resident.

Sheryl WuDunn Biography

Born in Manhattan in 1959, Sheryl WuDunn completed a BA (with honors) at Cornell University (1981) before pursuing an MBA at Harvard (1986) and an MPA at Princeton (1988). From 1990 to 2000, she served as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, covering developments in China and Japan. In this role, she received a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage, with husband Nicholas D. Kristof, of the Tiananmen Square protests. This achievement made WuDunn the first Asian American to win a Pulitzer Prize. Subsequently, WuDunn served as an executive and editor at the Times before becoming a vice president at Goldman Sachs. In 2011, she joined investment firm Mid-Market Securities, and in 2018, she and Kristof cofounded an orchard and vineyard, Kristof Farms. WuDunn has received numerous awards, including the Harriet Beecher Stowe Prize and the Overseas Press Club Award, for her work in journalism, business, and philanthropy.

For Half the Sky, WuDunn and Kristof traveled through Asia and Africa to interview girls and women who had experienced commercial sexual exploitation and other types of gender-based abuse, as well as those who are working to empower girls and women. Since then, the two have cowritten two more books: A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity (2014) and Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope (2020).