Authors Like Laura Hillenbrand

Alfred Lansing

American · Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage (1959)

Lansing (1921–1975) was a journalist who had served in the US Navy during the Second World War. To reconstruct Ernest Shackleton’s 1914–1916 Antarctic expedition he interviewed ten surviving members of the crew and was given the journals and diaries of eight others. After the Endurance was crushed by pack ice, the 28 men lived on the floes and then took to small boats; all of them survived.

John Hersey

American · A Bell for Adano (1944), Hiroshima (1946)

Hersey was born in 1914 in Tianjin, China, to American missionary parents, and reported the Second World War for Time and Life. In 1944 The New Yorker published his “Survival”, about John F. Kennedy’s PT-109 crew stranded in the Solomon Islands. Hiroshima, which follows six survivors of the atomic bomb, filled an entire issue of the magazine in August 1946. He died in 1993.

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Svetlana Alexievich

Belarusian · The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Voices from Chernobyl (1997)

Alexievich was born in 1948 in Ukraine and grew up in Belarus, where she worked as a journalist. The Unwomanly Face of War is built from interviews with hundreds of Soviet women who served in the Second World War, given largely in their own words. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015.

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Dick Francis

Welsh-born British · Dead Cert (1962), Forfeit (1968), Whip Hand (1979)

Francis was born in Pembrokeshire in 1920 and became a champion jump jockey; in 1956 he was riding the Queen Mother’s horse Devon Loch when it collapsed near the finish of the Grand National. He went on to write more than 40 racing thrillers and won the Edgar Award for best novel three times. A 1999 biography by Graham Lord claimed that his wife, Mary, wrote much of the work, which Francis denied. He died in 2010.

Erik Larson

American · The Devil in the White City (2003), Dead Wake (2015), The Splendid and the Vile (2020)

Larson was born in Brooklyn in 1954 and worked as a newspaper journalist before turning to narrative history. The Devil in the White City sets the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 against a serial killer working nearby; Dead Wake follows the last crossing of the Lusitania in 1915. His most recent book, The Demon of Unrest (2024), covers the months before the American Civil War.

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Ben Macintyre

British · Agent Zigzag (2007), Operation Mincemeat (2010), Prisoners of the Castle (2022)

Macintyre was born in 1963 and is a writer and columnist for The Times. His books tell true stories of the Second World War from declassified files and family papers: Operation Mincemeat follows the 1943 plan to deceive Germany with a dead man carrying false papers, and Prisoners of the Castle the Allied officers held at Colditz.

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Nathaniel Philbrick

American · In the Heart of the Sea (2000), Mayflower (2006)

Philbrick was born in Boston in 1956 and lives on Nantucket. In the Heart of the Sea tells how the Nantucket whaleship Essex was rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in 1820 and how its crew survived for months in open boats; it won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

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Daniel James Brown

American · The Boys in the Boat (2013), Facing the Mountain (2021)

Brown was born in 1951 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Boys in the Boat follows the University of Washington rowing crew, sons of loggers and farmers, from the Depression to the gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Facing the Mountain follows Japanese American soldiers who fought in Europe while their families were held in US incarceration camps.

David Grann

American · The Lost City of Z (2009), Killers of the Flower Moon (2017), The Wager (2023)

Grann was born in 1967 and is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Killers of the Flower Moon investigates the murders of Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma; The Wager follows the crew of a British warship wrecked off Patagonia in 1741 and the conflicting accounts the survivors later gave.

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Susan Orlean

American · The Orchid Thief (1998), Rin Tin Tin (2011), The Library Book (2018)

Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend follows the German shepherd puppy found on a First World War battlefield in France who became a Hollywood star, and the owners who kept his name alive. The Library Book investigates the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Central Library.

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