We’re excited to announce the addition of Siddhartha Mahanta as a Stranger’s Guide senior editor.
Stranger’s Guide, launched in 2018 by Editor in Chief Kira Brunner Don and Publisher Abby Rapoport offers nuanced and multifaceted portraits of the places it highlights: Lagos, South Korea, the Mediterranean, Tehran, Scandinavia and California, among them. Stranger’s Guide released its Vietnam issue this past March, taking readers to the heart of the location that has quickly become a top destination for international travel.
Mahanta joins the Stranger’s Guide team with a diverse reporting background in literature, theater, film, food, corporate power, politics, and more. He previously worked as an editor for The New York Times and has served as editorial staff at Business Insider, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and Mother Jones where he covered a wide range of topics spanning from the debt ceiling to revolutions in Egypt and Libya, and more.
“Sid’s substantial reporting and literary background will only serve to further Stranger’s Guide’s mission to provide unique facets of each place, from the complex and controversial to the intimate and beautiful,” said Brunner Don.
Stranger’s Guide combines engrossing long-form writing, vivid photography and an astute editorial voice to depict a single location in a collective portrait centered on original works from local voices. Pieces cross genres from investigative journalism to literary travel narrative and explore diverse topics, from arts and sports to conflict and migration. Stranger’s Guide is 3-time National Magazine Award winner.
Previous issues have included Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen collecting the experiences of refugees, fighters and civilians from the Vietnam War, award-winning essayist, poet, and playwright, José Vadi telling tales of his grandfather and California’s migrant farmworkers, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka recalling Nigeria’s colonial past, Dan Rather and other Texans predicting what future awaits the state, the Washington Post’s Jason Rezaian highlighting Tehran’s hidden food spots, Edwidge Danticat on the trash that washes up on Haiti’s shores and fiction from Valeria Luiselli alongside a never before published in English series from Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
