Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright is an American writer and journalist who has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992. Born in Oklahoma City in 1947, he grew up in Dallas, Texas, and graduated from Tulane University before teaching English in Cairo. He started at Texas Monthly in 1980 and also contributed to Rolling Stone. He is best known for his 2006 book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. His other books include the 2020 pandemic thriller The End of October. He co-wrote the screenplay for The Siege (1998) and wrote the Showtime movie Noriega: God's Favorite (2000). His documentary My Trip to Al-Qaeda (2010) premiered on HBO and drew on his Middle East research. He also wrote the play Cleo, which opened in 2018, and plays keyboard in the Austin blues collective WhoDo.