Photo: Andrea Frazzetta

​Ben Mauk lives in Berlin.

​He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's, the London Review of Books, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He is working on his first book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

He co-founded and directs the Berlin Writers' Workshop and is a contributing editor at The Ballot. He has taught English literature and writing at the University of Iowa.

His work has been nominated for multiple National Magazine Awards ("Ellies") and has twice featured in Best American Travel Writing. His story for Virginia Quarterly Review about a year in the life of a German asylum town was a finalist for the 2018 National Magazine Award for feature writing and received a citation from the Overseas Press Club. He won the Reporting Award from NYU and the inaugural Jamal Khashoggi Award for Courageous Journalism for his coverage of the oppression of Turkic and Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, and his oral history of China's mass internment drive was nominated for the 2020 National Magazine Award for best illustrated story.
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He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a former Fulbright Scholar, and a frequent grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.​ 

​He writes an occasional newsletter.

Awards and Fellowships

2020
​Finalist, Best Illustrated Story, National Magazine Award
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2019
​Winner, Jamal Khashoggi Award for Courageous Journalism
Winner, The Reporting Award, New York University
Calderwood Journalism Fellow, The MacDowell Colony

​2018
​​Finalist, Feature Writing, National Magazine Award
Grantee, Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, New York University
Citation, Ed Cunningham Award, Overseas Press Club of America
​Winner, Best Short Nonfiction, Western Writers of America Spur Awards

​​2017
​​Winner, Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction

​2015-20
​Grantee, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting