Scaachi Koul is a Canadian culture writer at BuzzFeed Canada. She is the author of the book of essays One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter and was one of the reporters in BuzzFeed's Netflix documentary series Follow This. Before BuzzFeed, Koul worked at Penguin Random House Canada, the acquiring publisher of her book, and was an intern at Maclean's magazine. Her journalism has appeared in Flare, HuffPost Canada, The Thought Catalog, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and other publications.
Career
Koul was freelancing while still at the Ryerson School of Journalism. She wrote for Maclean's from 2009 to November 2012, introducing herself in a post by saying, "I am proving to be one of the finest writers of my generation. This fact should not be questioned." She graduated from Ryerson in 2012. From April to November 2014 Koul wrote the "Unf*ck Yourself" column for Hazlitt. In 2015 her column was rebranded "Scaach-22" with the new tagline "managing your own privilege without being a dick". In March 2015, while Koul was still employed by Penguin Random House Canada, they announced publication of a collection of her essays. Originally the collection was titled The Pursuit of Misery then it was changed to One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter. The book covers subjects including family, race, feminism, body image, and rape culture from her perspective as an Indian-Canadian woman growing up in the suburbs of Calgary. She also discusses her writing career and social media, including temporarily deactivating her Twitter account as a result of invective and threats following a request for long-form submissions from people who were not white men. Koul was praised for her wit and humour, ability to mix sarcasm and sentimentality, and for her effective use of confessional writing as a complement to analytical rigour. She received a shortlisted nomination for the 2018 Stephen Leacock Award for the best book of humour written in English by a Canadian writer.
Personal life
Koul was born in Calgary, Alberta. She was a member of the Girl Guides of Canada and participated in their youth programs. She is married and built her career in Toronto. She currently lives in New York. Koul is Indo-Canadian, and her writing on race and shadism draws from her own life. She has stated that though she is a brown person, her fair skin has allowed her access to a kind of white privilege, and when she goes to India she is "basically acting as a white person".
