Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane grew up in the Dorchester section of Boston’s inner-city. Since his first novel, A Drink Before the War, won the Shamus Award, he’s published eight more novels with William Morrow & Co. that have been translated into more than 30 languages and become international bestsellers: Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone Baby Gone; Prayers for Rain; Mystic River; Shutter Island; The Given Day; and the forthcoming Moonlight Mile. Morrow also published Coronado, a collection of five stories and a play, and both Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone have been made into award-winning films. In January 2010, Columbia Pictures released the motion picture adaptation of Shutter Island, directed by Martin Scorcese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, and Mark Ruffalo.

Lehane has an MFA from Florida International University and is the writer-in-residence at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he runs the Writers in Paradise writers’ conference. Before becoming a full-time writer, Mr. Lehane worked as a counselor with mentally handicapped and abused children, waited tables, parked cars, drove limos, worked in bookstores, and loaded tractor-trailers. His one regret is that no one ever gave him a chance to tend bar. He and his wife divide their time between St. Petersburg and Boston.