Underground Girls of Kabul (Nordberg)

Author Bio
• Birth—
• Where—
• Education—B.A., Stockholm University; M.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Pulitizer (contributing journalist to series)
• Currently—lives in New York, New York


Jenny Nordberg, Sweden and the United States, is a New York-based foreign correspondent and a columnist for Swedish national newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.

In 2010, she broke the story of "bacha posh"—how girls grow up disguised as boys in gender-segregated Afghanistan. The front page story was published in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, and Nordberg's original research was used for opinion pieces around the world and inspired several works of fiction.

Her book, The Underground Girls of Kabul, published in 2014, reveals entirely new aspects of the practice and goes deep into the gender segregation and resistance among women in Afghanistan. Five years in the making, this cross-border investigation is described by Publisher's Weekly as "one of the most convincing portraits of Afghan culture in print.” She is also developing bachaposh.com as an online resource for girls who have grown up as boys due to segregation.

Together with the Times' investigative unit, Nordberg previously worked on projects such as an examination of the American freight railroad system; a series that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and U.S. efforts at exporting democracy to Haiti. She has also produced and written several documentaries for American television, about Iraqi refugees, Pakistan's nuclear proliferation and the impact of the global financial crisis in Europe.

In Sweden, Nordberg was a member of the first investigative team at Swedish Broadcasting's national radio division, where she supervised projects on terrorism and politics. Nordberg has won awards from Investigative Reporters and Editors, The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights and Foreningen Gravande Journalister.

Jenny Nordberg holds a B.A. in Law and Journalism from Stockholm University, and an M.A. from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. (Bio courtesy of International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.)