Elizabeth Becker

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Beginning as a war correspondent in Cambodia for the Washington Post, Becker has covered international affairs for over four decades. She was part of the New York Times’ team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of 9/11, and she won two DuPont Columbia awards for NPR coverage of the Rwanda genocide and South Africa’s first democratic election. 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.

Becker 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.

Articles by this Author

Catherine Leroy Parachutes into Danger, Fall 2023 | Vol. 68, No. 7

When the Pentagon wanted a photographer to record the largest airborne assault in the Vietnam War, the most qualified candidate was a young French woman.

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Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

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