Richard Osman
Richard Osman was born on November 3, 1970, in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, England. He was educated at Charterhouse School before reading Social and Political Sciences at Pembroke College, Cambridge University. His career was spent almost entirely in television: he became Creative Director of Endemol UK, responsible for major game shows, and became a household name through his long-running role as co-host alongside Alexander Armstrong on the BBC quiz programme Pointless, which first aired in 2009.
Osman turned to fiction in his fifties with The Thursday Murder Club, published in September 2020. The book centres on four residents of the Coopers Chase retirement village who meet weekly to examine cold cases and find themselves investigating a live murder in their backyard. The combination of warm characterisation, satisfying plotting, and an unexpectedly moving engagement with ageing, friendship, and mortality struck an immediate chord. The Thursday Murder Club became the fastest-selling adult debut novel in UK publishing history, selling over a million copies in the United Kingdom alone and over ten million internationally. It has been translated into more than forty languages. The Man Who Died Twice (2021), The Bullet That Missed (2022), and The Last Devil to Die (2023) have each debuted at the top of the bestseller charts. A major Netflix film adaptation was released in 2024.
Osman’s dialogue is widely admired: the four central characters crackle with comic intelligence, and their relationships deepen satisfyingly across the series. Beneath the cosy surface, his books grapple seriously with the experience of ageing, the proximity of loss, and the dignity of older people, a demographic often underserved by mainstream commercial fiction.
Osman has received the British Book Award for Crime and Thriller Novel of the Year and has been celebrated for revitalising the tradition of the English cosy mystery for a contemporary audience. He lives in London and continues to write the Thursday Murder Club series to enormous popular and critical acclaim.
