Meet the Journalist: Ben Mauk

Ben Mauk discusses his year-long Pulitzer Center project on the EU asylum crisis, which culminated in three wide-ranging stories on migration, asylum, and xenophobia. For Virginia Quarterly Review, Ben spent a year visiting Sumte, a remote town in Lower Saxony where refugees briefly outnumbered residents by seven to one. His story detailed how the relationship between town and refugee shelter evolved as local resources became scarce. He also reported for the London Review of Books on the rise of xenophobic arson attacks on refugee shelters throughout Germany, where the tradition of arson as a form of populist protest has remained largely unexplored. And, for Granta, Ben reported from Krakow and Warsaw on the dwindling numbers of refugees who remain in Poland following the country's rightward political turn.