David Grann

David Grann has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003. He is the author of, most recently, “The White Darkness,” and of “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I.,” which won an Edgar Award, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and was named one of the best books of 2017 by the Wall Street Journal, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and other publications. He is also the author of “The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon,” which was adapted into a major motion picture.

Grann’s other book, “The Devil and Sherlock Holmes,” contains many of his New Yorker stories, which focus on everything from the mysterious death of the world’s greatest Sherlock Holmes expert to a Polish writer who allegedly left clues to a real murder in his postmodern novel. “Trial by Fire,” another magazine piece in the collection, exposed how junk science led to the execution of a likely innocent man in Texas. The story received a George Polk Award and the Silver Gavel Award, and it was cited by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in his opinion about the constitutionality of the death penalty. Grann has twice received the Sigma Delta Chi Award for excellence in journalism. Grann’s latest book, “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder,” was published in April, 2023.

Grann has previously written for the Times Magazine, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Before joining The New Yorker, he was a senior editor at The New Republic and, from 1995 to 1996, the executive editor of the newspaper The Hill. He holds master’s degrees in international relations (from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy) and creative writing (from Boston University). After graduating from Connecticut College, in 1989, he received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and did research in Mexico, where he began his career in journalism. He currently lives in New York with his wife and two children.