Jake Lamar

Last updated
Jake Lamar
Jake Lamar 6158.JPG
Jake Lamar signing at the 7th Interpol'Art Festival in Reims , in October 2012.
Born1961 (age 6263)
New York City, U.S.
Alma mater Harvard University

Jake Lamar (born in 1961 in The Bronx, New York City) is an African-American writer, novelist, playwright, and cultural critic [1] living in Paris. [1]

Contents

After graduating from Harvard University, Lamar spent six years writing for Time magazine. [2] He has lived in Paris since 1993 [3] and teaches creative writing at Sciences Po. [4] At age 30, he published a memoir, Bourgeois Blues, in which he evoked his relationship with his father. With it, he won the Lyndhurst Prize. [4] In 1993, inspired by the American writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, he moved to Paris in the 18th arrondissement where he still resides.

After a near fatal heart problem in 2015, Lamar wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times on the quality of the socialist system of health care in France. [5] His most recent work, Viper's Dream (No Exit Press, 2023) is a crime novel set in the jazz world of Harlem between the years 1936 and 1961. [6] A version of Viper's Dream was broadcast (in French) as a 10-episode radio play in 2019. That production included many jazz tracks of the period. Viper's Dream was published in French as a novel by Rivages/Noir in 2021. Viper's Dream was published in the US by Crooked Lane Books on September 19, 2023.

On July 4, 2024, Viper's Dream received one of the world's most prestigious prizes for crime fiction: the CWA Historical Dagger Award.

Fiction in English

Fiction in French

Plays

Awards


Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anatole France</span> French author and journalist (1844–1924)

Anatole France was a French poet, journalist, and novelist with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was a member of the Académie Française, and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian Rankin</span> Scottish writer

Sir Ian James Rankin is a Scottish crime writer and philanthropist, best known for his Inspector Rebus novels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William McIlvanney</span> Scottish novelist, short story writer, and poet (1936-2015)

William Angus McIlvanney was a Scottish novelist, short story writer, and poet. He was known as Gus by friends and acquaintances. McIlvanney was a champion of gritty yet poetic literature; his works Laidlaw, The Papers of Tony Veitch, and Walking Wounded are all known for their portrayal of Glasgow in the 1970s. He is regarded as "the father of Tartan Noir" and as Scotland's Camus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julien Gracq</span> French writer

Julien Gracq was a French writer. He wrote novels, critiques, a play, and poetry. His literary works were noted for their dreamlike abstraction, elegant style and refined vocabulary. He was close to the surrealist movement, in particular its leader André Breton.

Jean-Patrick Manchette was a French crime novelist credited with reinventing and reinvigorating the genre. He wrote ten short novels in the seventies and early eighties, and is widely recognized as the foremost French crime fiction author of that period. His stories are violent explorations of the human condition and French society. Manchette was politically to the left and his writing reflects this through his analysis of social positions and culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">R. J. Ellory</span> English thriller writer

Roger Jon Ellory is an English thriller writer.

Scott Phillips is an American writer primarily of crime fiction in the noir tradition. He was born in Wichita, Kansas, and after co-writing and directing the independent short film Walking Blues lived for several years in France, working as a translator and photographer. He returned to the United States living in California as a screenwriter, co-writing a 1996 thriller called Crosscut among many other projects, both credited and uncredited. He has sometimes been confused with another author of the same professional name.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thierry Marignac</span> French writer and journalist

Thierry Marignac is a French writer and journalist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter May (writer)</span> Scottish writer (born 1951)

Peter May is a Scottish television screenwriter, novelist, and crime writer. He is the recipient of writing awards in Europe and America. The Blackhouse won the U.S. Barry Award for Crime Novel of the Year and the national literature award in France, the Cezam Prix Litteraire. The Lewis Man won the French daily newspaper Le Télégramme's 10,000-euro Grand Prix des Lecteurs. In 2014, Entry Island won both the Deanston's Scottish Crime Novel of the Year and the UK's ITV Crime Thriller Book Club Best Read of the Year Award. May's books have sold more than two million copies in the UK and several million internationally.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter James (writer)</span> English crime fiction novelist (born 1948)

Peter J. James is a British writer of crime. He was born in Brighton, the son of Cornelia James, the former glovemaker to Queen Elizabeth II.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adrian McKinty</span> Irish crime novelist and critic

Adrian McKinty is a Northern Irish writer of crime and mystery novels and young adult fiction, best known for his 2020 award-winning thriller, The Chain, and the Sean Duffy novels set in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. He is a winner of the Edgar Award, the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, the Macavity Award, the Ned Kelly Award, the Barry Award, the Audie Award, the Anthony Award and the International Thriller Writers Award. He has been shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kelli Stanley</span> American author of mystery-thrillers (born 1964)

Kelli Stanley is an American author of mystery-thrillers. The majority of her published fiction is written in the genres of historical crime fiction and noir. Her best known work, the Miranda Corbie series, is set in San Francisco, her adoptive hometown.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Bayer</span> American novelist

William Bayer is an American novelist, the author of twenty-one books including The New York Times best-sellers Switch and Pattern Crimes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mick Herron</span> British novelist

Mick Herron is a British mystery and thriller novelist. He is the author of the Slough House series, early novels of which have been adapted into the Slow Horses television series. He won the Crime Writers' Association 2013 Gold Dagger for Dead Lions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pierre Lemaitre</span> French writer (born 1951)

Pierre Lemaitre is a Prix Goncourt-winning French author and a screenwriter, internationally renowned for the crime novels featuring the fictional character Commandant Camille Verhœven.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michel Bussi</span> French author (born 1965)

Michel Bussi is a French author, known for writing thriller novels, and a political analyst and Professor of Geography at the University of Rouen, where he leads a Public Scientific and Technical Research Establishment in the French National Centre for Scientific Research, where he is a specialist in electoral geography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Prix Mystère de la critique</span> French literary award

The Prix Mystère de la critique was established in 1972 by Mystère magazine, published by Éditions OPTA from 1948 to 1976, and is one of the oldest French awards for a detective novel. It continues to be awarded each year by its founder, Georges Rieben and his team, and has the characteristic of having survived the demise of the magazine.

William Beverly is an American crime writer, author of the 2016 novel Dodgers, winner of the Gold Dagger, an award given by the Crime Writers' Association for the best crime novel of the year. In 2017 Dodgers won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a British Book Prize in the mystery/thriller category, as well as the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">S. A. Cosby</span> American novelist

Shawn Andre Cosby is an American author of "Southern noir" crime fiction. He resides in Gloucester, Virginia, on the York River. Cosby has published four crime novels: My Darkest Prayer, Blacktop Wasteland, Razorblade Tears, and All the Sinners Bleed.

<i>Razorblade Tears</i> 2021 novel by S. A. Cosby

Razorblade Tears: A Novel is a crime novel by S. A. Cosby, published in July 2021 by Flatiron Books. This novel debuted at number 10 on the New York Times bestseller list. Jerry Bruckheimer's company has "optioned the story for Paramount."

References

  1. 1 2 The Library of Congress
  2. Interview with American writer Jake Lamar
  3. Jake Lamar, le jazz américain, le roman noir et Paris
  4. 1 2 3 4 "Jake Lamar". Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination. Retrieved 2022-05-27.
  5. TALK BY JAKE LAMAR
  6. Viper's Dream, No Exit Press