About Barry Siegel

Born in St. Louis and raised in Los Angeles, he edited the student newspaper at Pomona College, where he earned a bachelor's degree in English literature and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. After giving some thought to attending film school, he instead enrolled at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he earned a masters degree in 1972. In time, exposure to the harsh and penurious world of freelance writing encouraged him to seek a real job.

He began at the Los Angeles Times in 1976 as a staff writer in the feature section. In 1980 he became a roving national correspondent, pursuing a self-created assignment that involved no fixed beat, no relation to breaking news, and no time or space constraints. The unconventional narratives he's written since then, many about communities struggling with moral dilemmas, have taken him to all corners of the nation and beyond-from the dirt-poor towns of Donalsonville and Willacoochee in Georgia to Callao, Peru, and Rio Frio, Costa Rica; from Charleston, South Carolina to the Amish region of southern Indiana; from New Orleans to the Pacific Northwest, the gulf coast of Florida, the upper peninsula of Michigan and the farm country of southern Minneapolis. His articles have garnered dozens of honors, including two PEN Center USA West Literary Awards in Journalism, the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and the American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award. He won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for an article about a Utah man charged with negligence in the death of his son, and the judge who heard his case.

Barry Siegel's first book, A Death in White Bear Lake , published by Bantam Books in 1990 (and reprinted by Ballantine in 2000), told the story of a community that for 22 years never stopped wondering what it could-or should-have done to prevent a small boy's death. The Mystery Writers of American made it an Edgar Award finalist in the best fact crime category, the New York Public Library picked it as one of 25 "Books to Remember" for 1990, and a panel of experts assembled by the St. Louis Post Dispatch included it on an all-time list of the ten best true-crime books.

Barry Siegel's second book, Shades of Gray , published by Bantam Books in 1992, collected a number of his Los Angeles Times narratives into a volume hailed by Kirkus Reviews as "a wise report on how Americans handle ethical shades of gray...The best possible combination of journalism and storytelling, matching weighty themes with real-life, three-dimensional Americans to wrestle with them."

Barry Siegel's first novel, The Perfect Witness , published by Ballantine in 1998, introduced the ambivalent criminal defense attorney Greg Monarch, and the imaginary Chumash County, a lost fog-bound community set on the central coast of California. Actual Innocence , published by Ballantine in 1999, followed Greg Monarch as he pursued a death row case in El Nido County, an isolated and deceptively peaceful valley just inland from Chumash. Lines of Defense , published by Ballantine in July 2002, introduces sheriff's detective Douglas Bard, who must solve a pair of Chumash County murders on his own after Greg Monarch leaves for retirement on an island in the Pacific Northwest.

Barry Siegel's newest book, Claim of Privilege, published in June 2008 by HarperCollins, marks his return to narrative nonfiction. Here he chronicles the causes and lasting consequences (both personal and political) of the mysterious crash of a U.S. Air Force B-29 at the dawn of the Cold War.

The themes of Barry Siegel's fiction echo those of his journalism: In Chumash County as in the pages of the Los Angeles Times and his nonfiction books, his characters resolutely wrestle with the need to make choices and take action in ambiguous situations where there is no clearly right answer. His novels' plots incorporate much of what he has witnessed traveling the country for The Times. They are acts of imagination, but they rise from the type of events that unfold constantly in the American judicial system.

Barry Siegel lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Marti Devore, his daughter, Ally Siegel, and his buddy Pepper.