Elizabeth Kolbert Biography

Elizabeth Kolbert was born in 1961 in New York City. She spent her childhood first in the Bronx and then in Larchmont, New York, where she lived until graduating from high school in 1979. Kolbert is an author, journalist and environmentalist. She graduated from Yale University with a degree in literature in 1983 and then earned a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Universität Hamburg in Germany. In 1984, while still in Germany, she began writing for The New York Times, which transferred her to New York the following year.

Kolbert worked for The New York Times until 1999, serving as the Albany bureau chief and author of the “Metro Matters” column. She then became a staff writer for The New Yorker. She went on assignment to Greenland in 2001, which led her to delve deeper into her interest in global warming. Feeling that mainstream media coverage of the environment was lacking, Kolbert found her niche. Her research in the Arctic and other locations across the globe culminated in a 2005 series in The New Yorker titled “The Climate of Man,” for which she won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Journalism Award. This was just the beginning of a career exploring issues surrounding the environment.

Kolbert has earned many honors for her writing, including the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History in 2015 and the 2017 SEAL Environmental Journalism Award. Besides numerous articles and The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (2006) and has edited anthologies covering environmental issues. In recent years, Kolbert has lived in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.