Nicholas Kristof grew up on a sheep and cherry farm in Yamhill, Oregon. He is the son of Ladis "Kris" Kristof (born Vladislav Krzysztofowicz), who was born of Polish and Armenian parents in former Austria-Hungary and who emigrated to the United States after World War II, and Jane Kristof, both long-time professors at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.. Nicholas Kristof graduated from Yamhill Carlton High School, where he was student body president and school newspaper editor, and later went on to become a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard College. At Harvard, he studied government and worked on The Harvard Crimson newspaper; "Alums recall Kristof as one of the brightest undergraduates on campus," according to a profile in the Crimson.. After Harvard, he studied law at Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He earned his law degree with first-class honors and won an academic prize. Afterward, he studied Arabic in Egypt for the 1983-84 academic year.

After joining The New York Times in 1984, initially covering economics, he served as a Times correspondent in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. He rose to be the associate managing editor of The New York Times, responsible for Sunday editions. His columns have often focused on global health, poverty, and gender issues in the developing world. In particular, since 2004 he has written dozens of columns about Darfur and visited the area 11 times. He has also been a pioneer in multimedia: he was the first blogger on the New York Times' website, and he also Twitters, has a Facebook fan page and a YouTube channel. Kristof resides outside New York City with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, and their three children: Gregory, Geoffrey and Caroline.

Kristof is a member of the board of overseers of Harvard University and a member of the board of trustees of the Association of American Rhodes Scholars.

In 1990 Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, earned a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for their reporting on the pro-democracy student movement and the related Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. They were the first married couple to win a Pulitzer for journalism. Kristof has also received the George Polk Award and an award from the Overseas Press Club for his reporting which focuses on human rights and environmental issues.Kristof was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2004 and again in 2005 "for his powerful columns that portrayed suffering among the developing world's often forgotten people and stirred action." In 2006 Kristof won his second Pulitzer, the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary "for his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world."

In 2009, Kristof and WuDunn received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award.

Kristof's books, all co-authored with his wife Sheryl WuDunn, include The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (1994), Portrait of a Rising Asia and Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Knopf, September 2009)..

Among many of the motivations for writing "Half the Sky," Kristof explained to Jane Wales of the World Affairs Council of Northern California that the idea for the book was sparked by the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. After covering the protests, which resulted in some 500 deaths, Kristof and WuDunn were shocked to learn that roughly 39,000 Chinese girls died each year because they were not given the same access to food and medical care as boys. Yet WuDunn and Kristof could not find coverage of these deaths, even though they were far more numerous than the casualties at Tiananmen Square. That led them to dig deeper into questions of gender, Kristof said.

"Half the Sky" immediately hit the best-seller lists. Carolyn See, the book critic of The Washington Post, said in her review: "'Half the Sky' is a call to arms, a call for help, a call for contributions, but also a call for volunteers. It asks us to open our eyes to this enormous humanitarian issue. It does so with exquisitely crafted prose and sensationally interesting material....I really do think this is one of the most important books I have ever reviewed." In Cleveland, the Plain-Dealer reviewer said: "As Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" once catalyzed us to save our birds and better steward our earth, 'Half the Sky' stands to become a classic, spurring us to spare impoverished women these terrors, and elevate them to turn around the future of their nations.". The Seattle Times review predicted that "Half the Sky" may "ignite a grass-roots revolution like the one that eliminated slavery." In CounterPunch, Charles R. Larson declared: "Half the Sky is the most important book that I have read since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962. I am not alone in saying that this is the most significant book that I have ever reviewed."

Iraq War

In the run-up to the Iraq War, Kristof opposed the impending invasion and occupation of Iraq, particularly because he felt that the Bush administration did not articulate a well-reasoned basis for it and did not have clear, long-term plans for post-invasion Iraq. In a column published six months before the Iraq invasion titled "Wimps on Iraq", Kristof warned, "It looks as if the president, intoxicated by moral clarity, has decided that whatever the cost, whatever the risks, he will invade Iraq. And that's not policy, but obsession." In a column entitled "The Day After" in September 2002, during a reporting visit to Iraq, he declared: "In one Shiite city after another, expect battles between rebels and army units, periodic calls for an Iranian-style theocracy, and perhaps a drift toward civil war. For the last few days, I've been traveling in these Shiite cities...Karbala, Najaf and Basra...and the tension in the bazaars is thicker than the dust behind the donkey carts. So before we rush into Iraq, we need to think through what we will do the morning after Saddam is toppled. Do we send in troops to try to seize the mortars and machine guns from the warring factions? Or do we run from civil war, and risk letting Iran cultivate its own puppet regime?"

On May 6, 2003, less than two months into the war, Kristof published an op-ed column titled "Why Truth Matters," in which he questioned whether or not the intelligence gathered by the Bush administration, which purportedly indicated that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, was either faked or manipulated. In this article, Kristof cited as his source a “former ambassador” who had traveled to Niger in early 2002 and reported back to the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department that the uranium “allegations were unequivocally wrong and based on forged documents.” Kristof added, "The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted—except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway." Two months later, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV came forward publicly and published a now-famous op-ed in The New York Times titled "What I Didn't Find in Africa". This set off a series of events which resulted in what become known as "Plamegate": the disclosure by journalist Robert Novak of the — until then covert — status as a CIA officer of Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson. A criminal investigation was launched as to the source of the leak, as a consequence of which I. Lewis Libby, then-Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was indicted on obstruction of justice, false statement, and perjury charges, and subsequently convicted and sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and a $250,000 fine (though he never served time in prison because President Bush commuted his prison sentence). Kristof's May 6 article was mentioned in the federal indictment of Scooter Libby as a key point in time, and a contributing factor that caused Libby to inquire about the identity of the "envoy" and later divulge the secret identity of his wife to reporters.

"Grand bargain" with Iran

Kristof published several articles criticizing the missed opportunity of the "grand bargain"—a proposal by Iran to normalize relations with the United States, implement procedures to assure the US it will not develop nuclear weapons, deny any monetary support to Palestinian resistance groups until they agree to stop targeting civilians, support the Arab Peace Initiative, and ensure full transparency to assuage any United States concerns. In return, the Iranians demanded abolition of sanctions and a US statement that Iran does not belong in the so-called "Axis of Evil." In his columns, Kristof revealed the documents detailing this proposal and argued that the "grand bargain" proposal was killed by hard-liners in the Bush administration. According to Kristof, this was an "appalling mistake" since "the Iranian proposal was promising and certainly should have been followed up. It seems diplomatic mismanagement of the highest order for the Bush administration to have rejected that process out of hand, and now to be instead beating the drums of war and considering air strikes on Iranian nuclear sites." Kristof further believes that even if the grand bargain is not currently feasible, there is still an option for what he calls a "mini-bargain", i.e., a more modest proposal for normalizing U.S.-Iranian relations.

In June 2007 Kristof spoke on the importance of the "grand bargain" with Iran at a conference organized by the American Iranian Council in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The conference brought together a host of distinguished national and international policy makers, among them Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Ambassador Javad Zarif from Iran's UN Mission, Senator Chuck Hagel, and Ambassador Anders Lidén from Sweden, in an attempt to improve the public's understanding of U.S.-Iranian relations and promote normalization with Iran. Kristof recounted his trips to Iran and told the audience that on a people-to-people level Iran is one of the most pro-American countries in the Middle East. He argued that American hard-liners, such as Dick Cheney, are reinforcing and strengthening Iranian hard-liners, and vice versa. He reiterated his support for the grand bargain and warned against the possibility of a military strike on Iran, calling it "absolutely terrifying" and remarking that he can't imagine something that would do more to undermine American interests in the region.

Anthrax attacks columns

In 2002 Kristof wrote a series of columns indirectly suggesting that Steven Hatfill, a former US Army germ-warfare researcher named a "person of interest" by the FBI, might be a "likely culprit" in the 2001 anthrax attacks. Hatfill was never charged with any crime. In July 2004 Hatfill sued the Times and Kristof for libel, asserting claims for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Subsequently, Hatfill voluntarily dismissed Kristof as a defendant in the case when it became clear that the District Court lacked personal jurisdiction over Kristof. The suit continued against the Times and was initially dismissed by the District Court on the basis that the allegations in Kristof's articles, even if untrue, did not constitute defamation. In July 2005, however, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed the decision, and reinstated the suit against The New York Times. In January 2007 Judge Claude M. Hilton of the Eastern District of Virginia tossed out the suit, claiming that Kristof's anthrax articles were "cautiously worded" and asserted that the scientist could be innocent. Judge Hilton wrote that Kristof "made efforts to avoid implicating his guilt" and that "Mr. Kristof reminded readers to assume plaintiff's (Hatfill) innocence." Kristof praised the dismissal of the suit, commenting that he was "really pleased that the judge recognized the importance of this kind of reporting" and that it was "terrific to have a judgment that protects journalism at a time when the press has had a fair number of rulings against it". When the FBI exonerated Hatfill, Kristof wrote a column on Aug. 27, 2008, "Media's Balancing Act," in which he wrote: "So, first, I owe an apology to Dr. Hatfill. In retrospect, I was right to prod the F.B.I. and to urge tighter scrutiny of Fort Detrick, but the job of the news media is supposed to be to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Instead, I managed to afflict the afflicted."

Criticism of the anti-sweatshop movement

Kristof is critical of the anti-sweatshop movement, claiming that the sweatshop model is a primary reason why Taiwan and South Korea—which accepted sweatshops as the price of development—are modern countries with low rates of infant mortality and high levels of education, while India—which generally has resisted sweatshops—suffers from a high rate of infant mortality (3.1 million Indian children under the age of five die every year, mostly from diseases of poverty.) While admitting that sweatshop work is tedious, grueling, and sometimes dangerous, he argues that it is considerably less dangerous or arduous than most alternatives in poor countries. Sweatshops provide much-needed jobs and boost the economy of extremely poor countries. He has called for well-meaning Americans to stop campaigning against sweatshops because it leads to closing down of manufacturing and processing plants in places where they are needed most. Responding to his critics, Kristof argues that campaigning to raise the wages in sweatshops will not achieve that goal; rather, the pressure will cause companies to rely on capital-intensive factories in better-off countries, avoiding Africa altogether.

Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide

Kristof has also criticized in his Times column the Turkish government's ongoing denial of the Armenian Genocide and what he calls the United Nations's inability to stand up to Turkey on this issue. Kristof believes the United Nations has capitulated to regimes that have actively committed atrocities in the past (Turkey) and in the present (Sudan).

Israeli—Palestinian conflict

Kristof supports Israeli and U.S. negotiation with Hamas as a means to resolve the Israeli—Palestinian conflict. He criticizes Israel for collective punishment of Gazans and holds that the lack of negotiations only strengthens extremists. He also advocates removing Israeli settlements from Hebron since "the financial cost is mind-boggling, and the diplomatic cost is greater," even if the settlements were not illegal in the eyes of much of the world. Kristof contrasts "two Israels": an oppressive security state in the Palestinian territories and a "paragon of justice, decency, fairness - and peace," in the work of Israeli human rights activists, journalists, and jurists.

Slovenia

Kristof consistently uses Slovenia in his New York Times op-ed columns as a flail to shame American healthcare. For example: "... it’s scandalous that babies born in the United States are less likely to survive their first year than babies born in Slovenia" (31 January 2006); "American children are twice as likely to die by the age of 5 as children in Portugal, Spain or Slovenia" (28 February 2009); and "No wonder we spend so much on medical care, and yet have some health care statistics that are worse than Slovenia’s" (12 September 2009). However, his 31 January 2006 blog ("Apologies to Slovenia") had expressed regret at the offense he had caused. On 15 September 2009 the acting consul general for Slovenia, Melita Gabri?, objected to Kristof's use of Slovenia as a "derisory sort of punch line."

In 2006, The New York Times held the Win a Trip with Nick Kristof contest, offering college students and high school teachers the opportunity to win a reporting trip to Africa with Kristof by submitting essays outlining what they intend to accomplish in such a trip. From among 3,800 students who submitted entries, Kristof chose Casey Parks of Jackson, Mississippi. In September 2006, Kristof and Parks traveled to Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, and the Central African Republic and reported on AIDS, poverty, and maternal mortality. During the trip, Kristof published his New York Times columns while Parks wrote about her observations in her blog.

The success of this partnership between experienced journalist and aspiring college students and teachers prompted the Times to hold the Second Annual Win A Trip with Nick Kristof contest in 2007. Leana Wen, a medical student at Washington University in St. Louis, and Will Okun, a teacher at Westside Alternative High School in Chicago, were the winners of the 2007 competition. During summer 2007, they traveled with Kristof to Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Congo, and blogged about their experiences. Filmmaker Eric Daniel Metzgar joined Kristof, Wen and Okun on their trip. The resulting film, Reporter, premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and aired on HBO in February 2010. In reviewing the film, which was executive produced by Ben Affleck, Entertainment Weekly wrote: "In Reporter, he's a compelling figure, a cross between Mother Teresa and the James Woods character in Salvador, and what seals the intensity of his job is the danger." The Washington Post observed, "Ideally, [Kristof] hopes to teach his companions, who won a contest to travel with him, about the value of witnessing the world's atrocities and scintillating them into stories that will call on people to act. Which is what Kristof did with his work in Darfur, Sudan: He caused people -- from George Clooney on down -- to do whatever they can."

The Third Annual Win A Trip with Nick Kristof was announced on January 17, 2009. Kristof chose University of South Carolina student Paul Bowers for the trip. The two traveled along with Times videographer Sean Patrick Farrell to West Africa to report on medical issues there. In May, they visited Senegal, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. Stops along the way included state-run hospitals, a school for the blind, the Carter Center in Monrovia, a roadside blackboard displaying the news, maternity wards, and several rural medical centers.

The fourth Win a Trip journey took place in May 2010. The winner was Mitch Smith, a Kansan student studying at University of Nebraska. Smith had never been outside the United States before. They traveled to Gabon, Republic of Congo, and Democratic Republic of Congo.