Dennis Lehane: Confessions of a Novelist Turned TV Showrunner

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens.

In this episode, recorded live at the 2024 Writers Conference, I sit down with bestselling crime novelist and TV writer/producer Dennis Lehane for a lively, wide-ranging conversation about how he approaches writing books vs. television scripts, his advice for writing true crime stories, as well as his journey developing his two latest AppleTV limited series, Black Bird and the upcoming Firebug, both starring Taron Egerton. Lehane is that rare novelist who has found acclaim and a large audience both in fiction and on the screen. A handful of his novels have been made into excellent films – Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and Shutter Island, to name a few – and in recent years he has become a much in-demand television creator and showrunner, a role that first began for him two decades ago, when he joined the now-famous Season 4 writers room on David Simon’s iconic show The Wire.

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