Nicholas D. Kristof is a columnist for the New York Times—a position he has held since 2001. Before that, he was a foreign correspondent for the Times, including stints as bureau chief in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. He and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, covered the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, winning a joint Pulitzer Prize for their reporting. Kristof won a second Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for his columns on the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Among other awards he has won are the George Polk Award, the Anne Frank Award, the Goldsmith Award for Career Excellence in Journalism (from Harvard University), and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize’s Lifetime Achievement Award (together with WuDunn).

For his Times column, Kristof has traveled to numerous countries to highlight issues such as war, poverty, ethnic unrest, and sex slavery. This makes him an ideal author for a book on giving, as he has already reported on many causes and organizations that seek solutions to problems around the world. He has written several other books, including Half the Sky (also written with WuDunn) about the oppression of women worldwide. He holds a degree in government from Harvard University and a law degree from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.