The Archive Project - Patrick Radden Keefe

On this episode of “Literary Arts: The Archive Project,” we feature journalist Patrick Radden Keefe from a Portland Arts & Lectures event in February 2023. Keefe is the author of five books of nonfiction, most recently “Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Rebels, and Crooks,” a collection of essays from his work as a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine.

NPR called “Rogues,” “a wonderful book, not only because Keefe’s prose is masterful, but because he has a preternatural gift for reading people. He recognizes that we’re all unreliable narrators of our own lives, and writes about his subjects with a keen sense of understanding.” He is also the author of “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Mystery in Northern Ireland,” as well as “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.”

In this talk, Keefe speaks to his writing process of what his editor termed ”investigative melodrama.” He is drawn in by fascinating real-life characters like Arthur Sackler of “Empire of Pain,” and Dolours Price of “Say Nothing,” as way to explore, as he says, “the arbitrary lines we draw between what’s legal and illegal, what society sanctions and celebrates and what it condemns and punishes.”

Bio:

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the decade by Entertainment Weekly. His previous books are “The Snakehead” and “Chatter.” His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast, “Wind of Change.”