Malka Older


Malka Older is an author and humanitarian worker. She was named the 2015 Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and she has more than eight years' experience in humanitarian aid and development.
Infomocracy, released in 2016, is her first novel, and is the first in the series The Centenal Cycle, which also included Null States, released in 2017 and State Tectonics in 2018, which won a Prometheus Award in 2019.

Education

Older earned an undergraduate degree in literature from Harvard University, and a Masters in international relations and economics from the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. She is currently a PhD candidate: her doctoral work on the sociology of organizations at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris explores the dynamics of multi-level governance and disaster response using the cases of Hurricane Katrina and the Japan tsunami of 2011.

Career

Older has more than a decade of experience in humanitarian aid and development, ranging from field level experience as a Head of Office in Darfur to supporting global programs and agency-wide strategy as a disaster risk reduction technical specialist. In between, she has designed and implemented economic development initiatives in post-disaster context, supervised a large and diverse portfolio as Director of Programs in Indonesia, and responded to complex emergencies and natural disasters in Sri Lanka, Uganda, Darfur, Indonesia, Japan, and Mali, in the last three as Team Leader.

Awards and recognition