Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane was born in 1965 in the Dorchester neighbourhood of Boston, the child of Irish immigrants, and grew up in the working-class world that would become the setting for most of his fiction. He studied creative writing at Eckerd College and Florida International University before publishing his first novel, A Drink Before the War, in 1994, introducing private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. He wrote five Kenzie & Gennaro novels through the 1990s, building a reputation as one of crime fiction's most morally serious voices before stepping outside the series for Mystic River (2001), a story of childhood trauma and violence in working-class Boston that became a critical and commercial breakthrough and, via Clint Eastwood's 2003 film adaptation, an Academy Award winner.

Lehane followed it with Shutter Island (2003), later filmed by Martin Scorsese, then returned to historical fiction with the Coughlin Trilogy, a multi-generational saga of an Irish-American Boston family spanning Prohibition to the Second World War; Live by Night won him the Edgar Award for Best Novel. He returned to Kenzie and Gennaro once more with Moonlight Mile (2010), and has continued to alternate between crime series and standalone literary thrillers, most recently Small Mercies (2023), set during Boston's 1974 busing crisis.

Alongside his novels, Lehane has worked extensively in television, writing for The Wire and creating and showrunning other series. He continues to write and lives in the Boston area.