Mary Louise Kelly
Mary Louise Kelly is a co-host of All Things Considered, NPR's award-winning afternoon newsmagazine.
Previously, she spent a decade as national security correspondent for NPR News, and she's kept that focus in her role as anchor. That's meant taking All Things Considered to Russia, North Korea, and beyond (including live coverage from Helsinki, for the infamous Trump-Putin summit). Her past reporting has tracked the CIA and other spy agencies, terrorism, wars, and rising nuclear powers. Kelly's assignments have found her deep in interviews at the Khyber Pass, at mosques in Hamburg, and in grimy Belfast bars.
Kelly first launched NPR's intelligence beat in 2004. After one particularly tough trip to Baghdad — so tough she wrote an essay about it for Newsweek — she 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.
Kelly's writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Washingtonian, The Atlantic, and other publications. She has lectured at Harvard and Stanford, and taught a course on national security and journalism at Georgetown University. In addition to her NPR work, Kelly serves as a contributing editor at The Atlantic, moderating newsmaker interviews at forums from Aspen to Abu Dhabi.
A Georgia native, Kelly's first job was pounding the streets as a political reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 1996, she made the leap to broadcasting, joining the team that launched BBC/Public Radio International's The World. The following year, Kelly moved to London to work as a producer for CNN and as a senior producer, host, and reporter for the BBC World Service.
Kelly graduated from Harvard University in 1993 with degrees in government, French language, and literature. Two years later, she completed a master's degree in European studies at Cambridge University in England.
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U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón reflects on her term and the urgency of connecting to nature through poetry. -
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks to author and former New York Times Paris bureau chief Elaine Sciolino about the new book, How to Fall in Love with the Louvre.
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NPR's Mary Louise talks with Mark Rylance about Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, in which he revisits his role as Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Emma Pattee. Her debut novel, Tilt, is about a devastating earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, and one pregnant woman's quest to get back home after it.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with author Colm Toibin about his new novel Long Island, which centers around a woman dealing with the fallout of a pregnancy caused by her husband's betrayal.
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Why are so many love interests in romantic comedy or romance movies architects? NPR finds out from an Architectural Digest writer.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks to Deborah Rutter, former head of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in her first interview since the board installed President Trump as its new chair. -
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with writer Jo Nesbo about his new thriller, Blood Ties. In it, two brothers with a dark history stand in contrast to the setting, a pretty little spa town.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks to author Joseph Finder about his new thriller novel The Oligarch's Daughter, a tale of a man on the run from an elusive and mysterious adversary.
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NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with actor Naomi Watts about her new book "Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I'd Known About Menopause."
