Lawrence Osborne

Lawrence Osborne is a British novelist and travel writer whose fiction is characterized by atmospheric settings in the developing world, moral ambiguity, and a coolly stylish prose that draws comparisons to Graham Greene and Paul Bowles. Born in England in 1958, Osborne has lived for extended periods in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and other parts of the world far from his origins, and this expatriate sensibility permeates all of his work.

His travel writing — including The Naked Tourist (2004) and The Wet and the Dry: A Drinker’s Journey (2013) — established him as a distinctive observer of the frictions between Western travelers and the cultures they move through. But it is his fiction that has brought him his widest readership. The Forgiven (2012), set among wealthy Western tourists in Morocco after a fatal road accident, was made into a film in 2022 starring Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain. Hunters in the Dark (2016), set in Cambodia, won the Prix Femina étranger in France.

His subsequent novels — Beautiful Animals (2017), set on the Greek island of Hydra during the refugee crisis, and Only to Sleep (2018), an authorized continuation of the Philip Marlowe series commissioned by the Raymond Chandler estate — further demonstrated his range and versatility. His 2021 novel On Java Road, set in Hong Kong amid the pro-democracy protests, was described by critics as his most politically urgent work.

Osborne lives primarily in Bangkok and continues to write fiction and journalism. He is widely admired as one of the finest contemporary practitioners of the literary thriller rooted in colonial and post-colonial geography.