By Paige Asberry
Staff writer
The Dillon Lecture Series has hosted many notable guests, and the upcoming April speaker is no exception.
David Grann is a New York journalist and novelist, whose bestselling book, “Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI”, was turned into a 2023 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro.
Grann graduated with his Bachelor’s degee in Government from Connecticut College in 1989. While he was still in college, Grann was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which allowed him to conduct research in Mexico, and there began his career as a freelance journalist.
In 1993, Grann received his Master’s degree in international relations from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Only a year later, he was hired at The Hill, a Congress-focused Washington newspaper. He also earned a master’s in creative writing from Boston University, where he taught classes for fiction and creative writing. In 2003, Grann was hired as a staff writer for The New Yorker.
While working with The New Yorker, Grann wrote the piece “Trial by Fire” which earned him the George Polk Award and the Sigma Delta Chi Award. He also wrote “The Mark of a Masterpiece”, which got him sued, but the case ended up being dismissed.
Grann’s first book, a nonfiction piece titled The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, was published in 2009, and since then, Grann has released two more books and had his work published in two other anthologies.
His popular 2014 book, “Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI”, details the murders of the Osage Native Americans and how it precipitated the creation of the FBI. It was adapted in 2023 into a film directed by Martin Scorsese.
Grann will be speaking at the second lecture of 2024 at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday at the Hutchinson Sports Arena. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for students, but free for Hutchinson Community College students and faculty with school I.D.
