Krithika Varagur is an author, journalist, editor, and speechwriter in New York. Her 2020 book The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project was published by Columbia Global Reports and draws from reporting on three continents to explain how Saudi Wahhabi proselytization transformed the Muslim world. She is currently writing The Singh Princesses, a nonfiction history book about three Anglo-Indian sisters in Victorian England, for Penguin Press (US) and Viking (UK). (Short preview here in the NYRB.)

Krithika works at Fenway Strategies, a firm founded by President Barack Obama’s speechwriters, and she has been an editor at and contributor to The Drift since its launch in 2020. Krithika won a Silvers-Dudley Prize for journalism in 2024, was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 (Media) list in 2021, and was the Newswomen’s Club of New York’s Foreign Correspondent of the Year in 2020. Her story on love and genetic testing in Nigeria won an Overseas Press Club award for “best international reporting… showing a concern for the human condition,” her piece on the world’s oldest figurative cave painting for The Economist’s 1843 Magazine won first place in Arts & Entertainment Features from the Society for Features Journalism, and her three-part New York Review of Books series on Minneapolis after George Floyd was a Deadline Club Awards finalist. She is a visiting scholar at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, and is working on a project to archive medieval Chola epigraphy in South India, with support from The Explorers Club.

Her writing has been published in outlets including The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, 1843, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, NPR, The Intercept, The Drift, and the AP. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Geographic Explorers program (to retrace the steps of Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in Indonesia and Malaysia), the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the International Reporting Project, the International Women’s Media Foundation, the Amtrak Writer Residency, the Overseas Press Club Foundation, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture, and more. She has corresponded live for outlets including CNBC, NPR, Democracy Now!, the BBC’s Newshour and Outside Source, and Deutsche Welle.

As a foreign correspondent from 2016 to 2020, she reported widely on religion and politics in Southeast and South Asia and was the primary Indonesia correspondent for The Guardian and the Financial Times. She covered landmark elections in Jakarta and Malaysia, broke investigations into labor conditions at Ivanka Trump’s clothing factory in West Java and grave desecration at Donald Trump’s resort in Indonesia, reported from the public flogging of gay Indonesians in Aceh, chronicled the reunions of Timor-Leste's stolen children, and traveled by cargo ship to the spice island once traded for Manhattan. She has also reported from India, Myanmar, Thailand, Singapore, the Balkans, Kenya, and Nigeria. In the U.S., she has reported on topics including racial justice, police reform in Oregon, and police brutality in Minnesota. From 2020-2021, she was the inaugural “At Work” columnist at The Wall Street Journal, reporting widely on young people in the workplace, from the CIA to minor-league baseball.

Krithika has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a master’s degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies, where she was a Fulbright scholar and received the Alistair Cooke Award in Journalism. She has written humor and satire for The Harvard Lampoon, The New Yorker, and McSweeney’s. She is HEFAT-certified to work in hostile environments through RPS Solutions, with support from the Rory Peck Trust. She wrote her first news story, about the Château de Fontainebleau, as a teenage intern at the New York Times’ Paris bureau and became a contributing writer to Vogue India at 21. She is on the board of Columbia Global Reports and is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities, the Newswomen’s Club of New York, the Explorer’s Club, the Frontline Club, and the Overseas Press Club. She was on season 17 of the BBC quiz show Mastermind.

Homepage photo: A park ranger illuminates the oldest storytelling art in the world, a hunting scene painted about 44,000 years ago in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. © Krithika Varagur, 2019.