Megan Abbott on crime writing‘s power to change society

The Writing Life

Fresh from the Noirwich Crime Writing Festival comes Megan Abbott's astonishing lecture about the power of crime fiction and true crime to influence and reflect society, and the ethics and responsibilities of being a crime writer. Why has so much crime writing focused on the perpetrator, not the victim? How can representation in the genre improve, and why does it matter?

Megan is the award-winning author of nine crime novels, including the just published The Turnout, and the bestselling You Will Know Me and Dare Me. Her work has won or been nominated for the CWA Steel Dagger, the International Thriller Writers Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and five Edgar awards. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Paris Review and the Wall Street Journal. She is also the author of The Street Was Mine, a study of hardboiled fiction, and film noir. She received her Ph.D. in American literature from New York University. A writer on HBO’s highly acclaimed The Deuce, she recently served as co-showrunner and co-creator of Dare Me, which completed its first season on the USA Network and Netflix internationally.

Introduced by Henry Sutton, co-director of Noirwich and professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

Hosted by Simon Jones and Steph McKenna.

Watch the extended video version of the lecture, including a Q&A between Megan and Henry: https://youtu.be/X2J4pBgPyTY

More about Noirwich: https://noirwich.co.uk/

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Music by Bennet Maples.