Discipline: Literature – nonfiction

Ben Mauk

Discipline: Literature – nonfiction
Region: Berlin, GERMANY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2019, 2023

Ben Mauk is a Berlin-based writer, journalist, and filmmaker. He was a finalist for the 2018 National Magazine Award in feature writing and in 2019 he received the inaugural Jamal Khashoggi Award for Courageous Journalism and the NYU Carter School of Journalism Reporting Award. He was a 2022 Poynter Fellow at Yale.

He writes for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. His first film, Reeducated, an immersive V.R. documentary and co-production with The New Yorker, won the 2022 Emmy Award for Outstanding Interactive Media and a 2022 Deadline Club Award.

At MacDowell in 2019, Mauk completed a 24,000-word oral history project on life for Turkic Muslims in contemporary Xinjiang, which would appear as the centerpiece of a special “borders” issue of The Believer magazine. He also completed a proposal for a nonfiction book-in-progress, tentatively titled The Fugitive World. During his 2023 Fellowship, he drafted a set of chapters for his forthcoming nonfiction book The Fugitive World. While in residence, Mauk won a Peabody Award for his reporting with The New Yorker and a De Groot Foundation Lando Grant for The Fugitive World.

Studios

Wood

Ben Mauk worked in the Wood studio.

Wood Studio, given to the residency program by Mrs. Frederick Trevor Hill, was completed in 1913 in memory of Mrs. Hill’s mother, Helen Ogden Wood. Like Schelling Studio, the building is sided with large, overlapping pieces of hemlock bark. When the studio was renovated in 1995, MacDowell staff researched the origins of this unusual building material and…

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