Sonia Shah

Sonia Shah is a journalist and author of books on migration, disease, and human-animal relations. Her 2020 book, The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, selected as a finalist for the 2021 PEN/E.O Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, combines reportage, personal narrative and natural history to explore the life-saving power of migration in the face of climate change. Her 2016 book, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond, a finalist for the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in science/technology, delves into the history of cholera to describe how politics, culture and geography transform harmless microbes into pandemic-causing pathogens. Her 2010 book, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years, which tells the story of humankind’s oldest scourge, was long-listed for the Royal Society’s Winton Prize. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Nation, and elsewhere and her new book, Special: the Rise and Fall of a Beastly Idea, winner of a 2023 Whiting Grant for Creative Nonfiction, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.