Alison Killing may be the first architect to win a Pulitzer Prize. Two weeks ago, when the list of honorees was announced, Killing, a 41-year-old Rotterdam-based architect, was on it, thanks to work she did using satellite imagery to spot hundreds of camps in China’s Xinjiang region, many of them newly built, in which the Chinese government is believed to be detaining almost a million Muslims. The article that resulted, published in BuzzFeed News, has been praised not just for its revelations about China’s war on Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other minority groups but also for Killing’s investigative methods.
Born in Newcastle, England, Killing studied architecture at Cambridge and Oxford Brookes, then worked for the engineering firm Buro Happold and several architecture and urban design firms in London and Rotterdam. In 2010 she decided that she wanted to work for herself. She took part in a community design program called 72 Hour Urban Action and curated an exhibition about death and architecture. Then she created Migration Trail, the story of two European migrants told through data, and began seeing herself as a tech-based storyteller. At that point, she says, “If I had really wanted to be building, I would have been doing it.”
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