Literary Arts

Laura Lippman & David Simon

Conversation

View Subscription Options

Event Description

Laura Lippman and David Simon met and married as crime reporters for the Baltimore Sun. Lippman took that experience and translated it into a career as a bestselling detective novelist; Simon, in turn, created HBO’s The Wire, Treme, The Deuce and more.

Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman is a New York Times bestselling novelist who has won more than 20 awards for her detective fiction—and been nominated for thirty more, including the Anthony, the Agatha, the Shamus, and the Nero Wolfe. Since her debut in 1997, she has published over 20 works, including a novella, a collection of short stories, and the wildly popular detective series about “accidental PI” Tess Monaghan.

Lit Hub recently named her one of the “essential” female crime writers of the last hundred years. She also has written for the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and T Magazine, and prior to her career as a novelist, she was a journalist for two decades.

Her novel Every Secret Thing, optioned for film by Academy Award-winning actress Frances McDormand, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2014, starring Diane Lane, Elizabeth Banks, and Dakota Fanning.


David Simon

David Simon is an author, screenwriter, and producer. From 1983 to 1995, he was a crime reporter with the Baltimore Sun, and during that time, he learned to draw from his insights as an investigative journalist to craft rich narratives that confront some of the most daunting challenges facing America’s urban centers. Simon has authored a wide range of nonfiction works, both in journalism and book-length form, but he is best known for his contributions to television.

Simon has been a screenwriter and producer for several critically-acclaimed television series, including Homicide: Life on the Street, which won him the WGA Award for Best Writing, The Wire, which delivered a panoramic portrait of Baltimore’s era of economic decline, corruption, and broken social systems; and Treme, set in a post-Katrina New Orleans working to rebuild its neighborhood and culture. This latest series The Deuce, a gritty look at the pornography industry in the 1970s, premiered on HBO this year. He is also the creator of the HBO miniseries The Corner, Generation Kill, and Show Me A Hero. 

Simon received a B.A. from the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and co-author of The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. Simon has won several Emmys, among other television awards, and was a 2010 MacArthur Fellow and named a Utne Reader visionary in 2011.

Lippman and Simon live in Baltimore with their daughter.

Selected Works:

Laura Lippman

Series

Baltimore Blues (1997)
Butchers Hill (1998)
In Big Trouble (1999)
The Sugar House (2000)
In a Strange City (2001)
The Last Place (2002)
By A Spider’s Thread (2004)
No Good Deeds (2006)
Another Thing to Fall (2008)
The Girl in the Green Raincoat (2011)
Hush, Hush (2015)

Novels

Every Secret Thing (2004)
To The Power of Three (2005)
What the Dead Know 2007)
After I’m Gone (2014)

David Simon

Television

The Deuce (creator/writer, 2017-Present)
Show Me a Hero (writer, 2015)
Treme (creator/writer, 2010-2013)
Generation Kill (writer/producer, 2008)
The Wire (creator/producer/writer, 2002-2008)
The Corner (writer/producer, 2002)
Homicide: Life on the Street (writer/producer, 1993-1999)

Nonfiction

The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1997)
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991)

There’s always time to read. Don’t trust a writer who doesn’t read. It’s like eating food prepared by a cook who doesn’t eat.Laura Lippman
Laura Lippman’s stories aren’t just mysteries; they are deeply moving explorations of the human heart. She is quite simply one of the best crime novelists writing today.Tess Gerritsen
By the time ‘The Wire’ reached the end of its run, commentators went from posing the coy question, ‘Is “The Wire” the best show on television?’ to making the bold statement, ‘‘‘The Wire” is the best show on television’— boldness that soon seemed spineless once seemingly everyone defaulted to calling it simply, ‘The best show in television history.’New York Times Magazine on The Wire

Sponsors

Novella Sponsor

Public program support provided by