Photo: Andrea Frazzetta

​Ben Mauk lives in Berlin.

​He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's, and the London Review of Books, 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. He is part of the mentorship collective PERIPLUS.

He is a two-time finalist for the National Magazine Award and has twice featured in the Best American Travel Writing ​anthology series. 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, a MacDowell Calderwood Journalism Fellow, and a five-time Pulitzer Center grantee.​ 

​He writes an occasional newsletter.