Dennis Lehane visits with students at Amherst in 2010 and Stanford in 2011.
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 has published eight more novels with William Morrow & Co. that have been translated into more than 30 languages and have become international bestsellers: Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone Baby Gone; Prayers for Rain; Mystic River; Shutter Island, The Given Day and Moonlight Mile.
Morrow also published Coronado, a collection of five stories and a play. The latter has received stage productions in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and Genoa, Italy. Award-winning films based on novels by Lehane include Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River, the latter a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award, and winner of the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel as well as the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction given by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. In February 2010, Columbia Pictures released the motion picture adaptation of Shutter Island, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, and Mark Ruffalo.
More recently, Lehane has been writing for the screen. He is adapting his short story, Animal Rescue, as well as co-writing with George Pelecanos, the adaptation of Dick Lehr’s The Fence for HBO. He is developing an original pilot for F/X, and has written for The Wire.
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.
For more information about Dennis Lehane, please visit his website.