George Pelecanos

Steven King has called him “perhaps the greatest living American crime writer”, but George Pelecanos’ talents and activities extend far beyond the detective fiction genre. An award-winning journalist, he has also produced independent movies and television series, including one of the greatest TV series to have come out of America, the “Wire”, for which he also scripted episodes.

Born in Washington DC in 1957 to Greek parents, Pelecanos never lost touch with his roots. The names and identities of the protagonists in his best-selling novels—from Dimitri Karras to Nick Stefanos and Spiro Lucas—reveal that the 57-year-old writer prefers to write what he knows, as does his decision to set his stories in and around his hometown and his willingness to stare DC’s less photogenic aspects straight in the eye.

At the Onassis Stegi, George Pelecanos will be talking to the journalist Marilena Astrapellou about his relationship with Greece and with the America of his books and scripts: an America of the dispossessed and the down-at-heel, of folk that didn’t get their fair share when society was dishing out access to the ‘American dream’.