Mary Louise Kelly

Mary Louise Kelly is a host of All Things Considered, NPR's flagship afternoon newsmagazine. She is also the host of NPR's national security podcast, Sources & Methods.

Previously, she served as senior national security correspondent, and she's kept that focus in her role as anchor. That's meant taking All Things Considered to North Korea, Iran, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond. Kelly's assignments have found her deep in interviews at the Khyber Pass, at mosques in Hamburg, and in grimy Belfast bars.

After one particularly tough trip to Baghdad, Kelly decided to try trading the spy beat for spy fiction. Her debut espionage novel, Anonymous Sources, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2013. It's a tale of journalists, spies, and Pakistan's nuclear security. Her second novel, The Bullet, followed in 2015 and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her 2023 memoir, It Goes So Fast, was a New York Times bestseller.

Her journalism has been recognized with an Edward R. Murrow Award for reporting from the West Bank, as well as two Gracie Awards, an Audie Award, the National Press Club Breaking News Award, the Atlanta Press Club Hall of Fame Award, a Leonard Zeidenberg First Amendment Award, the Ethics in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Washington Women in Journalism Award for Outstanding Broadcast Journalist. She was a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist for on-the-ground reporting from Iran.

Kelly has interviewed presidents and prime ministers, generals and spy chiefs; she has sat down with 11 CIA directors. In addition, she is known for in-depth interviews with figures including actors Judi Dench, Matt Damon, Reese Witherspoon, and Jane Fonda; authors Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, and Amor Towles; and musicians Yo-Yo Ma, Harry Styles, and Paul McCartney. She remains mortified that she once managed to hang up, mid-interview, on Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry.

Kelly serves as a moderator for the Council on Foreign Relations, the Aspen Security Forum, the Munich Security Conference, the National Book Festival, and many others. She is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications. She sits on Harvard's Board of Overseers and has lectured as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, where she created a course on national security and journalism.

Kelly was born in Germany and grew up in Georgia. Her first job was pounding the streets as a political reporter at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 1996, she made the leap to broadcasting. She moved to London the following year to work as a producer for CNN and as a senior producer, host, and reporter for BBC News.

Kelly graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with degrees in Government and Romance Languages and Literatures. Two years later, she earned an MPhil with distinction in European studies from the University of Cambridge in England. She lives in Washington, DC.