Sarah Koenig

Journalist and radio personality Sarah Koenig began her career covering politics for various high-profile news outlets before joining the production team of "This American Life" (WBEZ, 1995-), where her 2014 spin-off "Serial" became a podcast phenomenon. Born in Pennsylvania in 1969, Koenig grew up in a family of celebrated wordsmiths, with her father Julian widely considered one of the greatest copywriters in advertising history, and her stepfather, Peter Matthiesson, an award-winning novelist and nature writer. After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1990, Koenig landed her first job as a reporter covering benefit parties at The East Hampton Star, and gradually worked her way up the career ladder, spending three years in Russia working for ABC News and then The New York Times. On her return to the US, she was hired to cover politics for The Concord Monitor, where she worked on the 2000 Presidential Race, and later transferred to The Baltimore Sun, where she reported on the disbarring of Cristina Gutierrez, a defense attorney who, coincidentally, would later play a pivotal role in Koenig's most successful project. In 2004, she began working as a producer for "This American Life" (WBEZ, 1995-), the weekly hour-long broadcast which had established itself as a beloved fixture of public radio since its debut nine years previously. Koenig became a key member of the show's team and in 2006, won a Peabody Award for "Habeas Schmabeas," an episode focusing on the suspension of the Habeas corpus law at Guantanamo Bay. But it was the show's first spin-off, "Serial," where Koenig enjoyed her biggest success. Released in 2014, the podcast saw Koenig investigate the death of Maryland high school student Hae Min Lee in 1999 after being approached by the family of Adnan Syed, the man who claimed he had been wrongly convicted of her murder. Using excerpts from the trial and new interviews with key witnesses and Syed himself, Koenig uncovered information that the defense and prosecution had previously been unaware of, and sparked an unprecedented amount of attention in both the case and the podcast format, becoming the quickest ever to pass five million downloads.