Sonia Shah

Sonia Shah Biography

Sonia Shah is an American investigative journalist and author of Indian origin. Her works and articles are mostly concentrated on corporate power related to agriculture, oil and pharmaceutical industries, and also on gender equality. She started publishing books in the early 1990s, and her published books include - Between Fear and Hope (1992), Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire (1999), Crude: The Story of Oil (2004), The Body Hunters (2006), The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years (2010) and Pandemic (2017). Human rights, medicine, and politics remained some of her popular subjects on which she regularly wrote columns and articles. She earlier served as writing fellow of The Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation.

She was born in New York, US to Indian immigrants in the year 1969. Her extended family lived in Mumbai and Bangalore. As a part of their job, her parents had to shuttle between India and US, and both practiced medicine. So Sonia too had frequent shifts between these two countries since young. She completed her graduation in journalism, philosophy, and neuroscience from Oberlin College. Known to be a science journalist and non-fiction author, she published several books and also wrote columns for magazines and other journals.

As a writer, her writings explore different countries on various aspects, and are of non-fiction nature. Apart from Indian culture and social life, she also wrote about South Africa, Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, and Australia. She has been featured in BBC and many shows related to current affairs across the globe. She also lectured at universities and colleges across the globe on various topics. Many of her columns were published in several magazines. She also served as a consultant for several documentary films. Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond – is her most recent book published in 2017.

Published: N/A

Updated: June 06, 2018