Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning American author and journalist best known for her work in Cambodia and Vietnam.
Her singular coverage of Cambodia under Pol Pot is the basis of the French feature film “Rendezvous Avec Pol Pot” (Meeting With Pol Pot in English) that opened in Cannes and has received multiple awards.
She began reporting in Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Since then she has covered international affairs for five decades including as a New York Times correspondent, the Senior Foreign Editor at National Public Radio and Washington Post correspondent. She was part of the Times’ team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of 9/11. She won two DuPont Columbia awards for NPR coverage of the Rwanda genocide and South Africa’s first democratic election. She has reported from all continents, including posts in Phnom Penh and Paris.
She is the author of five books including YOU DON’T BELONG HERE: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War (2021) which tells the hidden story of women who covered the Vietnam War. A best seller, it has been praised as a masterwork. The book received Harvard’s Goldsmith Award, the Sperber book Prize and was named the military book of the year by Foreign Affairs.
Her 2013 book “OVERBOOKED: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism,” also a best seller was an Amazon book of the year and was hailed by Arthur Former as “required reading” about the future of global tourism.
In 2019 Conde Nast Traveler named Becker one of the people who has changed how the world travels because of her book and one of the most powerful women in the travel world for emphasizing a conservationist ethic in tourism.
She is the author of the now classic “WHEN THE WAR WAS OVER: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge, “ originally published in 1986, won a Robert F. Kennedy award. The movies “Rendezvous Avec Pol Pot” and “Bophana” by acclaimed Cambodian director Rithy Panh were based on this book.
In 2015 she testified as an expert witness at the international war crimes tribunal of the senior Khmer Rouge leaders.
She 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.
To learn more about Elizabeth Becker:
Website: https://elizabethbecker.com/
IG: ehb47
Author of:
YOU DON’T BELONG HERE: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War
OVERBOOKED: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism
WHEN THE WAR WAS OVER: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution