Full bio of this year’s winner Jane Mayer
Jane Mayer joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in March 1995. Based in Washington, D.C., she writes about politics, law and national security for the magazine. Recent subjects include the impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision on the 2012 presidential campaign, the Koch Brothers’ funding of the Tea Party Movement, the Obama Administration’s prosecution of national security leaks, and the administration’s expanded use of drones in the war on terror.
Before joining The New Yorker, Mayer was for twelve years a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. In 1984, she became the Journal’s first female White House correspondent. She was also a war correspondent and a foreign correspondent for the paper. Among other stories, she covered the bombing of the American barracks in Beirut, the Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the final days of Communism in the Soviet Union. Mayer is a winner of the 2012 George Polk Award, and the 2011 Robin Toner Prize for political reporting, She also won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism in 2010, the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2009, the Edward Weintal Prize from Georgetown University in 2009, the Ridenhour Book Prize in 2009, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize in 2009, the and Harvard University’s Goldsmith Book Prize in 2009, and the Helen Bernstein Award from New York Public Library in 2009. In 2008 she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award, and for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Mayer is the author of the best-selling 2008 book “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” which was chosen by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year, and as well as by The Economist, Salon, Slate, and Bloomberg as one of the best books of the year. She is also the co-author of two other best-selling books: “Strange Justice,” written with Jill Abramson and published in 1994, was a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award for nonfiction; her first book, “Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988,” co-authored by Doyle McManus, is an acclaimed account of the Reagan White House’s involvement in the Iran-Contra affair.
Before joining the Journal, Mayer worked as a metropolitan reporter for the Washington Star. She began her career in journalism as a stringer for Time while still a student in college. She has also written for a number of other publications, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Review of Books.
Mayer, who was born in New York, graduated with honors from Yale and continued her studies in history at Oxford. She lives in Washington with her husband and daughter.
(bio courtesy of The New Yorker)
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