Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 26 May
7:30 PM - 8:30 PM
In the pantheon of contemporary crime writers, the name Michael Connelly is a perennial favourite. A former police reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Connelly has been thrilling readers since 1992 with his 15 acclaimed Harry Bosch thrillers, including his most recent, Nine Dragons, and several stand-alone bestsellers including The Poet.
More recently, he’s turned his attention to the courtroom end of the genre, beginning with The Lincoln Lawyer, a legal thriller which introduced LA defence lawyer Mickey Haller, that has just been adapted for the screen. One-time president of the Mystery Writers of America, Connelly’s books have been translated into 35 languages and have won numerous awards. His latest in the Mickey Haller series, The Fifth Witness, delves into the US foreclosure crisis, with characteristically murderous results.
Michael Connelly is in Australia as a guest of the Wheeler Centre and the Sydney Writers' Festival.
Featuring
Michael Connelly
A former police reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Connelly is the author of the Harry Bosch thriller series as well as several stand-alone bestsellers, including the highly acclaimed legal thriller, The Lincoln Lawyer.
Michael has been President of the Mystery Writers of America. His books have been translated into 31 languages and have won awards all over the world, including the Edgar and Anthony Awards. He lives in Tampa, Florida, with his family.
Michael decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing - a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews.
After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat. In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars.
In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written.
After three years on the crime beat in L.A., Connelly began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch. The novel, The Black Echo, based in part on a true crime that had occurred in Los Angeles, was published in 1992 and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by the Mystery Writers of America.