David Grann, Person-in-Residence
Boston University’s guest in Conversations in the Arts & Ideas, and Kilachand Honors College’s Person-In-Residence this Spring is the award-winning writer David Grann.
David Grann is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. He is the author of The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2009, and Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Edgar Allen Poe Award for best true crime book in 2017. His most recent book is The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. He has also published The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, a collection of his writing for The New Yorker. You can read Grann’s full bio below.
Browse the drop-down boxes below to learn more about each event, including a film screening of Killers of the Flower Moon. The lecture event on Wednesday evening is open to the public, while the film screening on Sunday and the coffee on Thursday morning are reserved for the BU community only.
Film Screening, Killers of the Flower Moon
Date & Time: Sunday, February 25, 2024 @ 6:30 pm
Location: Kilachand Hall Commons, Room 101
(91 Bay State Rd, Boston, MA 02215)
Event Description: Join us before the David Grann visit with a film screening of Killers of the Flower Moon. Please note that this movie is rated R for violence, some grisly images, and language. Run time: 3.5 hours.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a 2023 American epic Western crime drama film directed and produced by Martin Scorsese. Eric Roth and Scorsese based their screenplay on the 2017 non-fiction book by David Grann. Set in 1920s Oklahoma, it focuses on a series of murders of Osage members and relations in the Osage Nation after oil was discovered on tribal land. The tribal members had retained mineral rights on their reservation, but a corrupt local political boss sought to steal the tribal members’ wealth.
Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone lead an ensemble cast, also including Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow and Brendan Fraser. Read more about the movie.
Attendance: This is a Kilachand Community Event, open to the BU community.
An Evening with David Grann
Date & Time: Wednesday, February 28, 2024 @ 7 pm
Doors will open at 6:30 pm
Location: Tsai Performance Center
685 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA 02215
Event Description: BU’s Conversations in the Arts & Ideas presents, “An Evening with David Grann.” The award-winning writer David Grann joins Professor Debbie Danielpour of BU’s College of Communication for a conversation about his life and work. Grann is the author of numerous books, including Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, and The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.
This event is sponsored by the Boston University Center for the Humanities, Kilachand Honors College, BU Arts Initiative, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Affairs, CAS Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Humanities, CAS Core Curriculum, College of Communications, Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, NEH Distinguished Teaching Professorship.
Register for Event: Admission is free; a reservation will ensure a place: DavidGrannBU.eventbrite.com
Registration opens on Monday, January 29, 2024.
Attendance: (For Kilachand Honors College Students) You must register for this event in advance and will be able to register early, beginning Monday, January 22 using the code BUAI24. At the event, a QR will be posted for you to check-in. You must check-in immediately following the event to earn co-curricular attendance credit for this event. This event counts as one co-curricular.
Student Coffee and Discussion with David Grann
Date & Time: Thursday, February 29, 2024 @ 10 am
*Please arrive early to ensure that everyone has time to get coffee and pastries before the event begins.
Location: Kilachand Hall Commons, Room 101
(91 Bay State Rd, Boston, MA 02215)
Event Description: David Grann meets with BU students over coffee and pastries for an informal discussion about his work and his life as a writer.
Attendance: (For Kilachand Honors College Students) At the event a QR will be posted for you to check-in. You must check-in immediately following the event to earn co-curricular attendance credit for this event. This event counts as one co-curricular.
David Grann's Full Bio
David Grann is an award-winning New Yorker writer and the bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager. Revered for nonfiction that jumps off the page, Grann doesn’t just write about incredible people—he walks in their shoes. Whether crossing the ocean or trekking through the Amazon, Grann digs deep to give his stories a pace and intensity unlike any other. In his talks, Grann explores his creative process—from what initially inspires him to investigate a story to his painstaking research and then links the (often) forgotten histories to their relevance to today.
His latest book, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder is a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. With the twists and turns of a thriller Grann unearths the deeper meaning of the events on the HMS Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire. The Wager debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and has remained on the list ever since, often in the top spot.
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, is a true-crime tale that unravels one of the most sinister crimes and racial injustices in American history. With over 100 weeks on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, it was a finalist for the National Book Award and ranked #1 on both Shelf Awareness and Amazon’s Single Best Books of the Year. Now Read This, the joint book club between PBS NewsHour and New York Times, selected Killers of the Flower Moon for their February 2018 read. Following a highly publicized bidding war for the film rights, Killers of the Flower Moon debuted at Cannes in 2023, with Martin Scorsese as director and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. The news of the movie combined with the popularity of The Wager brought Killers back to the New York Times bestseller list.
Known as “the man Hollywood can’t stop reading,” Grann breathes new life into historical events, gifting his readers factually accurate tales that read like a thrilling work of fiction and that are ripe for adaptation. In addition to the box office success Killers of the Flower Moon, Grann’s New Yorker articles “The Old Man & the Gun” and “Trial by Fire,” as well as his bestselling book The Lost City of Z have been adapted for the big screen. The White Darkness is being produced for Apple TV+ as a limited series starring Tom Hiddleston. Rights to The Wager were acquired prior to the book’s release, with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio reuniting as director and leading man.
In 2023, Barnes & Noble named Grann their inaugural Author of the Year in recognition of his impressive body of work and longtime adoration by booksellers around the country. “A master of nonfiction, much of it based in first-person reportage and archival digging, Grann uses our history as a mirror to entertain us, make us think, and show us who we are now,” writes the Barnes & Noble team in the awarding of this honor.
Bostonia Article: Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder
Author and alum David Grann follows his best-selling Killers of the Flower Moon with a new nonfiction book, The Wager, an 18th-century thriller on the high seas
