Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning American journalist and author, most recently of You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War which won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. Foreign Affairs named it the military book of the year.
An expert on Cambodia, she interviewed Pol Pot while he was in power and later was an expert witness at the international war crimes tribunal of the senior Khmer Rouge leaders.
Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge is now a classic and won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award. She is the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.
Her 2013 book “OVERBOOKED: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism” was an Amazon book of the year and was hailed by Arthur Former as “required reading” about the future of global tourism. In 2019 Conde Nast Traveler named Becker one of the people who has changed how the world travels.
Becker covered international affairs for over four decades, beginning as a war correspondent in Cambodia for the Washington Post, as Senior Foreign Editor at National Public Radio and as a New York Times correspondent. She was part of the Times’ team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of 9/11. She won two DuPont Columbia awards for NPR coverage of the Rwanda genocide and South Africa’s first democratic election. She has reported from around the world including foreign postings in Phnom Penh and Paris.
She was a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, holds a degree from the University of Washington and studied language at the Kendriya Hindi Sansthaan in Agra, India. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the board of the Oxfam America Advocacy Fund.