Kenneth R. Rosen travels the world to write in-depth stories about the impact of major geopolitical issues and conflict on individual lives. He is writing a book about the Arctic for Simon & Schuster for publication in 2026.

This year he is a MacDowell fellow, a finalist for a Scripps Howard Award in opinion writing, and a de Groot Foundation Writer of Note grant recipient. He works at The New York Times.

Rosen received the 2022 Kurt Schork Freelance Award for his reporting from Ukraine, Syria, and Malta, which the judges called “courageous multifaceted investigative work.” He is a two-time finalist for the Livingston Award in international reporting and, among other honors, he received the 2018 Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for War Correspondents for his reporting from Iraq and was a finalist in 2019 for his reporting from within Syria.

He is the author of Troubled: The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs (Little A, 2021), which The New York Times Book Review called “a searing exposé” and a “public service.” Troubled was a Times Editors’ Choice, one of Newsweek’s most highly anticipated titles of 2021, and was optioned separately as a feature film and a docuseries. 

Troubled helped launch independent inquiries, by the Government Accountability Office and the Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, into abuses at congregate care facilities for at-risk youth. His first book, Bulletproof Vest (Bloomsbury, 2020), was named one of the most fascinating books WIRED read that year.

He has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and VQR, among others. His work has been translated into Arabic, Spanish, German, and Japanese.

As a foreign correspondent and magazine writer, he has reported from more than two dozen countries across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, along the way receiving generous support from the MacArthur Foundation, the Mass Cultural Council’s Artist Fellowship program, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (inaugural journalist-in-residence), the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (Executive-in-Residence), the Alicia Patterson foundation, MacDowell (Calderwood Foundation Art of Nonfiction Grantee), the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Literary Journalist-in-Residence), the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (Grantee ’17, ’20), the Fulbright Program, the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, the Fund for American Studies (Robert Novak Fellow), the Steven Joel Sotloff Memorial Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation with John Jay’s Center on Media, Crime and Justice, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and the Logan Nonfiction Program at the Carey Institute for Global Good. 

He was previously an independent journalist and a senior editor and correspondent at Newsweek. He divides his time between Northern Italy and Western Massachusetts with his wife and their two children.