BEN MAUK

Photo: Andrea Frazzetta

The New York Times Magazine | February 3, 2019
Trillion-Dollar Nowhere

In the remote steppes of Central Asia, China is establishing the next foothold in its trillion-dollar campaign to transform global infrastructure.

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Illustration: Danica Novgorodoff

The Believer | October-November 2019
Weather Reports: Voices from Xinjiang
An oral history of China's mass internment drive

Winner, Jamal Khashoggi Award for Courageous Journalism
Winner, The Reporting Award, NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute

It was in some mountainous place. We drove out in a windowless van with a metal grate inside. I couldn’t see anything. Before, at the police station, they’d given me a medical exam. They’d taken a blood sample. I couldn’t understand what my sentence was—what I’d done wrong.

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[Læs på dansk]

Photo: Andrea Frazzetta

The New York Times Magazine | April 1, 2018
The Floating World

Anthologized in Best American Travel Writing 2019

Persecuted on land, members of Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese minority take shelter in improvised villages spread across the surface of the Mekong River’s waterways.

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Photo: Thomas Dworzak

Virginia Quarterly Review | Spring 2019
Mountain of Tongues

Can a nationalist movement from the internet save the world's most scattered people?

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Photo: Balazs Gardi

Harper's Magazine | October 2017
States of Decay

Winner, 2018 Western Writers of America, Best Short Nonfiction

Someone told me I could find a reclaimed uranium mill in Tuba City, so I drove up from Flagstaff through the Arizona badlands.

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Photo: Valerie Schmidt

Virginia Quarterly Review | Spring 2017
The Useful Village

Finalist, 2018 National Magazine Award, Feature Writing
Citation, 2018 Ed Cunningham Award, Overseas Press Club
Winner, 2017 Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction

In the fall of 2015, Germany designated Sumte, population 102, as a sanctuary for nearly 800 refugees. What followed was a living experiment in the country’s principles.

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[Read abridged version in The Guardian]

Photo: Ben Mauk

London Review of Books | Vol. 41 No. 18
Prisons in the Mountains

Winner, The Reporting Award, NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute

In August 2018 I was in Zharkent, a market town in Kazakhstan near the Chinese border, reporting on the extradition trial of an asylum seeker named Sayragul Sauytbay.

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Photo: Jasper Kettner

frieze | Issue 203 | May 2019
We'll Burn Your Pavilions

Can Natascha Süder Happelmann succeed in doing away with national ‘representation’ altogether?

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Photo: Pacific Standard

Pacific Standard | January 30, 2019 | Online
The Last Uranium Prospector

America's mid-century uranium boom changed the face of the West. Meet the man at the center of its secret afterlife.

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Photo: Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Maureen Paley / Photo Solutions

frieze | Issue 196 | June - August 2018
Hearing Things

If we have learned anything from the age of for-profit surveillance and deep-state data, it is that someone out there is listening.

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Photo: Ben Mauk

Granta Magazine | Issue 137 | Online
A Land without Strangers

All nations strive toward the superlative. Poland happens to be one of the most homogenous countries on earth.

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Photo: Ben Mauk

London Review of Books | Vol. 38 No. 18
Diary (On an Arson Epidemic)

As towns across Germany have accepted their federal allocation of asylum seekers, administrators have fashioned shelters out of disused factories, motels and parish houses, usually on the outskirts of town. At the moment, someone tries to burn one of these improvised hostels to the ground every two to three days.

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Photo: Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert

VICE Magazine | Vol. 22 No. 11 | November 2015
The Ballad of Murder Eyez

In peacetime, Abdul Rahman Masri became one of Syria's most celebrated rappers. Now a refugee in Germany, he's determined to speak for his home nation's lost generation.

[Read in VICE]