Patrick Radden Keefe
Bestselling Author of "Empire of Pain," "Rogues," and "Say Nothing" | New Yorker Staff Writer
Patrick Radden Keefe is a master investigative journalist and storyteller, whose groundbreaking reporting has exposed the Sackler family for their role in the opioid crisis and identified the culprit in a notorious, decades-old murder. In his lively talks, he offers a colorful and often funny behind-the-scenes look at the sagas he has spent his career exploring, and makes an inspiring case for the power of old-fashioned storytelling.
"I read everything he writes. Every time he writes a book, I read it. Every time he writes an article, I read it...He's a national treasure." —Rachel Maddow
"The literary style of New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe is iconic...Keefe delivers masterpieces." —Oprah Daily
Patrick Radden Keefe is a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker and the bestselling author of five books, which have been published into 24 languages. Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, a New York Times bestseller, received the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for the best nonfiction book published in the English language, and was shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year. His reporting on the Sacklers inspired the hit Netflix series Painkiller, on which he was an executive producer; the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary Crime of the Century, for which he served as a consultant and one of the chief on-camera voices; and the Oscar-nominated film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, in which he appeared on camera.
Keefe's international bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland received the National Book Critics' Circle Award, the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and the Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations for the best book on foreign affairs. It was named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune, and one of the ten best nonfiction books of the decade by Entertainment Weekly. The New York Times also named it one of the 20 Best Books of the 21st Century. Additionally, along with Empire of Pain, it was voted among the New York Times 'Readers Pick' Top 100 Books of the 21st Century. Both Say Nothing and Empire of Pain were selected by Barack Obama for his list of favorite books of the year. In November of 2024, FX released a dramatic limited series based on Say Nothing, which Keefe executive produced. His earlier book, The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream, about global migration and the underground empire of Sister Ping, a human smuggler in New York's Chinatown, is currently in development as a dramatic series from A24.
In 2020, Keefe was the creator and host of the 8-part investigative podcast Wind of Change, about the strange convergence of Cold War espionage and heavy metal music. The series was named the #1 podcast of the year by the Guardian and Entertainment Weekly and became an international hit for Spotify. It received two Webby Awards and three Ambie Awards from the Podcast Academy, including “Best Host,” and generated over 10 million downloads.
Most recently, Keefe released the New York Times bestseller Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks, a collection of twelve of his most celebrated New Yorker stories, which illustrates his "immense skill as a storyteller," according to NPR. "It's highly entertaining," the Los Angeles Times observed," but what shines through most brightly is Keefe's fascination with what makes us human even when we're at our most imperfect."
In addition to the New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe’s work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, New York Times Magazine, Slate, and numerous other publications, and he is a frequent commentator on NPR, the BBC, and MSNBC. He is a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and was twice a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the New America Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the New York Institute for the Humanities.
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