Elizabeth Kolbert Biography

Environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert was born July 6, 1961, in the Bronx, New York. She studied literature at Yale and, after graduating in 1983, studied at the Universitat-Hamburg in Germany through a Fulbright Scholarship. There she began writing articles for The New York Times. She went on to become chief of the newspaper’s Albany, New York, bureau. A staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999, she won National Magazine Awards for her writing for the magazine in 2006 and 2010. She also received the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kolbert is the author of The Prophet of Love: And Other Tales of Power and Deceit (2004); Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (2006); and The Sixth Extinction (2014), winner of the Pulitzer Prize.