Photo: Andrea Frazzetta

​Ben Mauk lives in Berlin.

​He writes for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. He is writing a 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 Periplus mentorship collective.

His story for Virginia Quarterly Review about a year in the life of a German asylum town was a National Magazine Award finalist for feature writing. His oral history of mass internment in China was a finalist for best illustrated story. His dispatches from Cambodia and Kazakhstan appear in the Best American Travel Writing anthology series.

In 2021, in collaboration with the filmmaker Sam Wolson, he developed and wrote an immersive V.R. documentary for The New Yorker on life inside a Chinese reeducation camp. For his coverage of the persecution of minorities in Xinjiang, he has won two Online Journalism Awards, a Deadline Club Award, the Reporting Award from NYU, jury prizes from SXSW and NewImages, a citation from the Overseas Press Club, and the inaugural Jamal Khashoggi Award for Courageous Journalism. 
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He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has been a Fulbright Scholar, Poynter Fellow, MacDowell Fellow, NYU visiting scholar, and frequent Pulitzer Center grantee.​ He is represented by Adam Eaglin of The Cheney Agency.

​He writes an occasional newsletter.