An Evening With Patrick Radden Keefe

'Empire of Pain' and 'Say Nothing' author, in conversation with crime correspondent Nicola Tallant

An Evening with Patrick Radden Keefe

Join us for a captivating evening with one of the most thrilling and forensic writers on real-life crime, Patrick Radden Keefe, on the occasion of this new book London Falling.

This on-stage conversation, with crime reporter Nicola Tallant, will take place in the Edmund Burke Theatre in Trinity College Dublin.

London Falling is a stunning tale of wealth, violence and deceit. It chonicles the story of a London teenager, Zac Brettler, who mysteriously fell to his death from a luxury apartment building on the banks of the Thames in 2019. When his grieving parents began their desperate quest to understand how their son had died, they made a terrible discovery: Zac had been leading a fantasy life, posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch. With it came the city’s terrifying underworld. It is a riveting story of greed, power and deception, and an indictment of the culture that has transformed London into a haven for the malignant forces that have come to influence us all.

Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the New York Times bestsellers Rogues, Empire of Pain and Say Nothing, as well as two earlier nonfiction books: The Snakehead and Chatter.

Patrick started contributing to The New Yorker in 2006. He received the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2014. Say Nothing received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, as well as the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and was selected by the New York Times as one of the “20 Best Books of the 21st Century.” Empire of Pain was awarded the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year.

He is the writer and host of WIND OF CHANGE, an award-winning 8-part podcast, which investigates the strange convergence of Cold War espionage and heavy metal music, and was named the #1 podcast of 2020 by The Guardian and Entertainment Weekly. He also executive produced the Emmy-nominated FX dramatic series SAY NOTHING, based on his book, which received a Peabody Award.

Patrick grew up in Dorchester, Massachusetts and went to college at Columbia. He received masters degrees from Cambridge University and the London School of Economics, and a law degree from Yale. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and fellowships from the New America Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

He lives in New York.

Nicola Tallant is an award-winning investigative journalist specialising in organised crime. She is known for her work at the Sunday World, and has a higher diploma in criminology, and has been awarded Irish Crime Journalist of the Year three times.

Since November 2020, she has hosted, edited, and produced the weekly Crime World podcast, which is listened to over a million times a month. In 2021 she released a 10-part podcast The Witness: In His Own Words, based on her best-selling book The Witness.

She lives in Dubin. her seventh book Groomed was released last year.

PRESENTED BY THE BORRIS FESTIVAL OF WRITING AND IDEAS.