Coll, Steve

After a distinguished 20-year career at The Washington Post, rising from general assignment reporter to managing editor, Steve Coll joined The New Yorker staff in 2005. The author of seven books, he has also served as president of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research and public policy institution, since 2007. He plans to step down as foundation president after a successor is selected.

Coll has twice received the Pulitzer Prize, once for Explanatory Reporting, for a series of Washington Post articles that he co-authored with David A. Vise in 1990 about the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in 2005, for General Nonfiction, for his book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.

Joining The Washington Post in 1985 as a reporter, Coll moved two years later to New York City to cover the world of corporate takeovers on Wall Street, the stock market crash, the Michael Milken investigations and the SEC as the newspaper’s financial correspondent. In 1989, he moved to New Delhi to become the paper’s South Asia correspondent. For three years he covered India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal. In 1992, he was appointed the newspaper’s first international investigative correspondent, based in London, from where he traveled widely to cover emerging trans-national subjects such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation and global economic integration.

His other professional awards include the 1992 Livingston Award for outstanding foreign reporting. He received the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award for his coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone, as well as the Overseas Press Club Award for international magazine writing. His 2008 book, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, received P.E.N. America’s John Kenneth Galbraith prize, and was a Pulitzer finalist in Biography. His latest book, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, has been shortlisted for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award.

His other books are: The Deal of the Century: The Break Up of AT&T (1986); The Taking of Getty Oil (1987); Eagle on the Street, based on the Pulitzer-winning account of the SEC's battle with Wall Street (with David A. Vise, 1991); On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia (1994).

Coll graduated cum laude and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, from Occidental College in 1980 with a degree in English and history. He lives in New York.

Steve Coll joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2012