Steve Coll is a staff writer at The New Yorker, the author of eight books of nonfiction, and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Between 1985 and 2005, he was a reporter, foreign correspondent and senior editor at the Washington Post. There he covered Wall Street, served as the paper’s South Asia correspondent in New Delhi, and was the Post’s first international investigative correspondent, based in London. He served as managing editor of the Post between 1998 and 2004. The following year, he joined The New Yorker, where he has written on international politics, American politics and national security, intelligence controversies and the media. 

Coll is the author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, published in 2004, for which he received an Overseas Press Club Award and a Pulitzer Prize. His 2008 book, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, won the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction in 2009 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. His book Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power won the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Award as the best business book of 2012. His most recent book Directorate S a follow-up to Ghost Wars, received the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.