Monte Reel

Monte Reel is an American author and journalist whose narrative nonfiction brings together investigative reporting, history, and science. His magazine writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s, among other publications, while his reporting career has included work for The Washington Post and Bloomberg Businessweek’s Projects & Investigations staff.

Reel served as The Washington Post’s South America correspondent from 2004 to 2008, after reporting for the newspaper in Washington and Iraq. His catalog title Between Man and Beast reconstructs the nineteenth-century African expeditions of Paul Du Chaillu, whose gorilla specimens and public claims became entangled with Victorian debates over evolution. The book places that adventure alongside questions of scientific credibility, race, religion, and celebrity in the period.

His journalism has received recognition both individually and as part of reporting teams. Reel was a member of the Washington Post staff that won the 2005 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting for coverage of lead contamination in Washington, D.C.’s water supply. He later shared the 2017 Gerald Loeb Award for Explanatory Reporting for Bloomberg News’s “Superbug Spreaders,” won the 2017 Overseas Press Club Morton Frank Award for “How to Rebuild Puerto Rico,” and shared the 2020 Morton Frank Award for the Bloomberg Green audio series “Blood River.”