Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty was born in 1968 in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, and grew up there during the worst years of the Troubles -- an experience that would later become the backbone of his most acclaimed work. He studied law at the University of Warwick and politics and philosophy at Oxford before moving to the United States in the early 1990s, living first in New York and later in Denver, Colorado, where he taught high school English and began writing fiction.

McKinty is best known for the Sean Duffy series, following a Catholic detective navigating Belfast's overwhelmingly Protestant police force during the 1980s, which has won the Edgar Award, the Ned Kelly Award three times, the Anthony Award, and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. After two decades of critical acclaim without major commercial breakthrough, his 2019 standalone thriller The Chain became a #1 New York Times bestseller, dramatically expanding his readership; he followed it with the survival thriller The Island in 2022. His books have been translated into more than forty languages.

McKinty now lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and two children.