Scott Turow

Scott Turow was born in Chicago in 1949 and practised law for decades alongside his writing career, working as an Assistant United States Attorney prosecuting corruption cases before moving into private legal practice. His first book, One L (1977), a memoir of his first year at Harvard Law School, became a staple recommendation for aspiring law students, but it was his debut novel, Presumed Innocent (1987), that made him one of the best-selling and most influential legal thriller writers of his generation, credited with essentially establishing the modern courtroom thriller as a mainstream commercial genre.

Turow set nearly all of his subsequent fiction in the same fictional Kindle County, an Illinois jurisdiction closely modelled on Chicago's Cook County, returning across thirteen novels to its prosecutors, judges and defence attorneys -- including Rusty Sabich, the central figure of Presumed Innocent, whom Turow revisited decades later in Innocent (2010), The Last Trial (2020) and Presumed Guilty (2025). His only novel outside that world, Ordinary Heroes (2005), is a Second World War story drawing on his father's wartime service.

Turow has continued practising law throughout his writing career, including pro bono death-penalty appellate work that informed his nonfiction book Ultimate Punishment (2003), and has served on the boards of several literary and legal organisations. His books have sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 40 languages. He continues to write and lives in the Chicago area.