Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright began writing for Texas Monthly in 1980 and left in 1992 to become a staff writer for the New Yorker, a role he still holds. His history of Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf, 2006), spent eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and was translated into 25 languages. The book won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Wright’s one-man play, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, was made into a documentary film that aired on HBO. The book later became a miniseries on Hulu starring Jeff Daniels and Alec Baldwin. Wright’s seventh book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (Knopf, 2013), is based on a profile he wrote of the writer-director Paul Haggis in the New Yorker that won the National Magazine Award in 2012. The best-selling God Save Texas also arose from a New Yorker article. In 2020, Wright published The End of October, a novel that eerily foreshadowed the COVID-19 pandemic that was just beginning to take over the country. That was followed in 2021 by a nonfiction book about the pandemic, The Plague Year.