Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He has won a Pulitzer Prize and three National Magazine Awards.His latest book, The Human Scale , is a sweeping, timely thriller, in which a Palestinian-American FBI agent teams up with a hardline Israeli cop to solve the murder of the Israeli police chief in Gaza. According to The New York Times, “Wright succeeds in this complex, deeply felt work.”He is the author of 11 nonfiction books. His book about the rise of al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf, 2006), was published to immediate and widespread acclaim. It has been translated into 25 languages and won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It was made into a series for Hulu in 2018, starring Jeff Daniels, Alec Baldwin, and Tahar Rahim.Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (Knopf, 2013) was a New York Times bestseller. Wright and director Alex Gibney turned it into an HBO documentary, which won three Emmys, including best documentary. Wright and Gibney also teamed up to produce another Emmy-winning documentary, for Showtime, about the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi.In addition to The Human Scale, Wright has three other novels: Noriega: God’s Favorite (Simon and Schuster, 2000) which was made into a Showtime movie starring Bob Hoskins; The End of October (Knopf, 2020), a bestseller about a viral pandemic that came out right at the beginning of COVID; Mr. Texas (Knopf, 2023), which has been optioned as a limited streaming series.In 2006, Wright premiered his first one-man play, “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” at The New Yorker Festival, which led to a sold-out six-week run off-Broadway, before traveling to Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. It was made into a documentary film of the same name, directed by Alex Gibney, for HBO.Before he wrote the novel, Wright wrote and performed a one-man show also called The Human Scale, about the standoff between Israel and Hamas over the abduction of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. The Public Theater in New York produced the play, which ran for a month off-Broadway in 2010, before moving to the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv. Many of the ideas developed in that play later evolved into the novel of the same name, published 15 years later.In addition to his one-man productions, Wright has written five other plays that have enjoyed productions around the country, including Camp David, about the Carter, Begin, and Sadat summit in 1978; and Cleo, about the making of the movie Cleopatra.Wright is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Society of American Historians, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also serves as the keyboard player in the Austin-based blues band, WhoDo.