Matthieu Aikins is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and a journalist and author who has reported from Afghanistan and the Middle East since 2008. He is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a Puffin Fellow at Type Media Center. His first book, The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, about an undercover journey to Europe with Afghan refugees, was published by Harper and Fitzcarraldo Editions in February 2022, and has been translated into eight languages.
In 2025, Aikins won the Pulitzer for Explanatory Reporting for a New York Times series on the causes of US defeat in Afghanistan. Aikins received the 2022 Pulitzer for International Reporting as part of a Times team that investigated civilian casualties from American airstrikes. The video investigation that he and his colleagues produced won two Emmy awards. He has also received the National Magazine, Polk, and Livingston awards. He is a past fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, New America, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy in Berlin, and his work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, and the anthology The Best American Magazine Writing.
Matthieu grew up in Nova Scotia, and has a master's degree in Near Eastern Studies from New York University.
