Manu Raju

Raju grew up in Darien, Illinois, the son of Tonse N. K. Raju and Vidya Raju, both doctors who emigrated from Karnataka, India in the 1970s and worked at the National Institutes of Health. His father, Tonse Raju, is a neonatologist and formerly a professor of pediatrics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His grandfather Gopalakrishna Adiga, was a legendary poet from South India who wrote in Kannada. Raju attended Hinsdale South High School, graduating in 1998. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, graduating in 2002 with a degree in business administration and having worked as the sports editor for The Badger Herald student newspaper.

Raju first started working on the assignment desk at NBC-15 in Madison, Wisconsin, before moving to Washington, D.C. in 2002. There, he took a job with Inside Washington Publishers, covering environmental policy. He later worked for Congressional Quarterly, The Hill newspaper and Politico, where he reported for seven years before joining CNN in September 2015. Before joining CNN, Raju was a regular guest on many networks and programs, including NBC's Meet the Press and CBS' Face the Nation. When he was hired by CNN, Erik Wemple of The Washington Post called the move a "towering get" for the network.

Raju has developed a reputation for finding out what politicians are discussing behind the scenes, and broke major stories during the 2013 government shutdown and during Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's high-profile reelection race in 2014. In 2016 for CNN, Raju was the network's lead correspondent covering Sen. Marco Rubio's presidential campaign, covered extensively the GOP establishment's struggle with Donald Trump and broke big news in high-profile Senate races, including in New Hampshire.

In 2017, Raju was featured on the cover of India Abroad newspaper, which dubbed him the "King of the Hill" for his reporting on key decision-makers in the United States and on Capitol Hill. "Raju excels at that inside-the-room reporting," a former Politico editor was quoted as saying. The article called Raju "one of the very few Indian American journalists in such a prominent position in the mainstream media."

Raju broke a major news story in January 2017 when he detailed a stock trade that raised ethical and legal questions for Tom Price, President Donald Trump's Health and Human Services nominee. The Trump administration requested a retraction, but fact-checkers found Raju's story to be accurate, and Wemple called Raju's reporting on the story "a model of careful and measured journalism."

In 2012, Raju was part of a team of four reporters that won the White House Correspondents Association's prestigious Merriman Smith Memorial Award for presidential reporting under deadline pressure for their coverage of the 2011 debt ceiling crisis. In 2015, Raju was awarded first prize by the Society of Professional Journalists in D.C. for beat coverage of the 2014 midterm elections, and a Folio Eddie Award for a feature profile he co-authored on Senator Elizabeth Warren.

In 2015, Washington Life magazine named Raju one of the city's "movers and shakers" under the age of 40. That year, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame for his high school, Hinsdale South.

Raju and his wife, Archana Mehta, are the parents of twins, a boy and girl, born in 2015.