David Grann – Author Biography
Early Life
David Grann was born on 10 March 1967 in New York. He studied government at Connecticut College, earned a master’s in international relations, and later an MFA in creative writing — an unusual path that blended policy, history, and narrative craft. He began his journalism career at The Hill and joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2003.
Career
At The New Yorker, Grann built a reputation for obsessively reported long-form stories about obsessions, mysteries, and forgotten history. His first book, The Lost City of Z (2009), retraced explorer Percy Fawcett’s fatal search for a lost Amazonian civilisation and became a bestseller. Killers of the Flower Moon (2017) — about the 1920s murders of Osage Nation oil millionaires and the birth of the FBI — won acclaim and was adapted by Martin Scorsese into a 2023 film. The Wager (2023), the story of an 18th-century shipwreck, mutiny, and survival, became another bestseller. He continues to write for The New Yorker.
Major Works
His three major books: The Lost City of Z (2009), Killers of the Flower Moon (2017), and The Wager (2023).
Writing Style and Themes
Grann writes narrative nonfiction with a novelist’s pacing and a detective’s patience: years of archival digging distilled into propulsive, cinematic storytelling. His recurring themes are obsession and its costs, the violence buried in official histories, survival against impossible odds, and the way truth gets distorted by power. He lets documents and diaries speak, building suspense from the historical record itself.
Legacy
Grann is among the most acclaimed narrative journalists of his generation; Killers of the Flower Moon was a National Book Award finalist and brought the Osage murders to worldwide attention. His books have repeatedly crossed from bestseller lists to major films, proving the commercial power of deeply reported history.
