Lawrence Osborne

UK | 2015

Lawrence Osborne was born in England in 1958. Has has lived in many places, such as Paris, where he stayed for ten years and wrote his first novel Ania Malina (1986) and the travelogue Paris Dreambook (1990), New York, Mexico, Istanbul and Bangkok, where he currently resides.

He has written extensively for American publications since then. He was a regular feature writer for the New York Times Magazine for several years, writing about many subjects; he has also contributed to Salon, Harper’s,The New Yorker, The Financial Times, The New York Observer, New York Magazine, Forbes, The Conde Nast Traveler, Playboy, The Daily Beast, Gourmet, The Wall Street Journal Magazine and Men’s Vogue, for whom he was the monthly Cellar Critic.

His short stories have also appeared in magazines such as Tin House and Fiction. His article “Drinking in Islamabad” which appeared in Playboy was awarded a 2011 Thomas Lowell Award for travel journalism and also won the Beer and Spirits category in the annual food writing awards of the Culinary Society of America. His short story “Volcano,” published in Tin House in 2011, was selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2012.

His memoir Bangkok Days (2009) was awarded the 2010 Premio Napoli and his novel The Forgiven (2012) was named one of the Best Books of 2012 by The Economist, Library Journal and The Guardian. A book about drinking, meanwhile, The Wet and the Dry was published by Harvill in London in early 2013 and was selected as one of the Best 10 Books of 2013 by Dwight Garner in The New York Times and by Men’s Journal.