Kevin Cullen

Image of Kevin Cullen in a suit with a green shirt

Kevin Cullen is an author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has written for The Boston Globe since 1985. At the Globe, he served as a local, national and foreign correspondent before becoming a columnist.

A Boston native, Cullen was graduated from the University of Massachusetts, attended Trinity College in Dublin, and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

He initially worked as the newspaper's law enforcement correspondent and in 1987 won a Livingston Award for his portrait of an East Boston hoodlum. He spent several stints on the Spotlight Team, the Globe's investigative unit, and was part of the team that in 1988 exposed the mobster James "Whitey" Bulger as an FBI informant.

He spent more than 20 years covering the conflict in Northern Ireland, more than any other American journalist, and in 1994 was honored by the Overseas Press Club of America for his interpretive reporting from Northern Ireland.

In 1997, he was appointed as the Globe's Dublin bureau chief, covering the peace process in Northern Ireland fulltime. He was described by The Irish Times as "the most informed American journalist on Irish affairs," while the media critic at The Independent of London called him "the most astute observer of Irish affairs in the American media."

In 2001, after four years abroad, he returned to Boston and joined the Globe's investigative team which won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003 for exposing the cover up of sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic priests.     

Cullen has been a frequent commentator on National Public Radio, the BBC, and RTE, Ireland's national broadcaster. His commentary about America, "The Real World," appears every week on the Lunchtime program on the Irish radio station Newstalk, and he writes regularly for The Irish Times and Sunday Independent.

He is, with Shelley Murphy, the co-author of The New York Times bestseller "Whitey Bulger: America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice," published in 2012 by Norton. He co-authored”Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church," and was a contributor to the book, "Britain and Ireland: Lives Entwined II."