Olen Steinhauer - Picador Guest Professor in the winter semester 2009/10

Olen Steinhauer grew up in Virginia, and has since lived in Austin, San Francisco, Boston, Brooklyn, Romania, Italy, and Hungary. He received his BA in English from the University of Texas at Austin and his MFA from Emerson College in Boston. In 1999, he won a yearlong Fulbright research fellowship to work on a novel in Romania. Since 2002, he has been a full-time novelist. He lives in Budapest with his wife and daughter. His first five novels formed a sequence chronicling the life of a fictional Eastern European country from 1948 until 1989, following the arc of the Cold War. They were shortlisted for a variety of awards and received significant critical acclaim in the US and the UK. 2009’s The Tourist, the first of a four-book series of espionage thrillers, was optioned for film by Warner Bros., with George Clooney slated to star. Happily, it was the first of his novels to reach the New York Times bestseller list. It has been published in 20 languages, including German. In addition to the novels that make up his bestselling series, Olen Steinhauer has also published three standalone novels. The movie adaptation of All the Old Knives (2015) was just released this April 2022, starring Chris Pine and Thandiwe Newton. Olen Steinhauer also gave his try with TV series with his espionage drama Berlin Station. It ran for three seasons, from 2016 to 2018.

Author Website