Ben Mauk is a freelance writer and journalist based in Berlin, where he directs the Berlin Writers' Workshop. His work appears in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and The New Yorker, among other publications. He was a finalist for the 2018 National Magazine Award in feature writing and in 2019 he received the inaugural Jamal Khashoggi Award for Courageous Journalism and the NYU Carter School of Journalism Reporting Award. He is working on a book of reportage, travel, and history. At MacDowell, he completed a 24,000-word oral history project on life for Turkic Muslims in contemporary Xinjiang, which will appear as the centerpiece of a special “borders” issue of The Believer Magazine in late 2019. He also completed a proposal for a nonfiction book-in-progress, tentatively titled The Fugitive World. In 2019, Ben received the inaugural Jamal Khashoggi Award for Courageous Journalism.
Ben Mauk
Studios
Wood
Ben Mauk worked in the Wood studio.
Wood Studio, given to the residency program by Mrs. Frederick Trevor Hill, was completed in 1913 in memory of Mrs. Hill’s mother, Helen Ogden Wood. Like Schelling Studio, the building is sided with large, overlapping pieces of hemlock bark. When the studio was renovated in 1995, MacDowell staff researched the origins of this unusual building material and…