Award Winner Jane Mayer
2008 John Chancellor Award Winner
Jane Mayer joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in March 1995. Based in Washington, D.C., she writes about politics for the magazine, and has been covering the war on terror. Recent subjects include Alberto Mora and the Pentagon’s secret torture policy, how the United States outsources torture (rendition), the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and the legality of C.I.A. interrogations. She has also written about George W. Bush, the bin Laden family, Karl Rove, and the television show “24.”
Before joining The New Yorker, Mayer was for twelve years a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. In 1984, she became the Journal’s first female White House correspondent. She was also a war correspondent and a foreign correspondent for the paper. Among other stories, she covered the bombing of the American barracks in Beruit, the Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the final days of Communism in the Soviet Union. She was nominated twice by the Journal for a Pulitzer Prize in the feature-writing category.
Before joining the Journal, in 1982 Mayer worked as a metropolitan reporter for the Washington Star. She began her career in journalism as a stringer for Time magazine while still a student in college. She has also written for a number of other publications, including The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Review of Books.
Mayer is the author of the current best-selling book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. She is also co-author of two books. Strange Justice, written with Jill Abramson, was published in 1994 by Houghton Mifflin and was a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award for nonfiction. Her first book, Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988, co-authored by Doyle McManus, was a best-selling account of the Reagan White House’s involvement in the Iran-Contra affair.
Mayer, who was born in New York, graduated from Yale in 1977 and continued her studies at Oxford. She lives in Washington with her husband and daughter.
Read Mayer’s work:
The Memo, The New Yorker, February 27, 2006
The Hidden Power, The New Yorker, July 3, 2006
The Black Sites, The New Yorker, August 13, 2007
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