Patrick Radden Keefe

Join us for a conversation with award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, writer Patrick Radden Keefe, author of worldwide phenomenon Say Nothing, and most recently Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty – another New York Times bestseller. 

Patrick will be joined in conversation with journalist Amanda Ferguson. 

Say Nothing a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions. Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and Time Magazine’s Non-Fiction Book of 2019, the book also received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and was selected by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade. 

Empire of Pain is a sweeping investigative chronicle of three generations of the Sackler family, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by Oxycontin. The book was awarded the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction and was a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year.

Patrick is the author of two other books: The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream, and Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping. 

Patrick has written investigative narrative non-fiction on a range of subjects, from the hunt for the drug lord Chapo Guzman to the tragic personal history of the mass shooter Amy Bishop. He received the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2014, and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016. . 

He is also the writer and host of  Wind of Change, an 8-part podcast series from Pineapple Street Studios, Crooked Media and Spotify, which investigates the strange convergence of espionage and pop music during the Cold War and was named the #1 podcast of 2020 by The Guardian. 

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 JD from Yale Law School. In addition to The New Yorker, his work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and other publications. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, 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. 

Amanda Ferguson is a freelance journalist from north Belfast. She is a Northern Correspondent and Ireland stringer for a range of clients including Reuters news agency and The Washington Post. A broadcaster and regular commentator on radio and TV across Irish, British, and international media outlets, you can find her online at amanda.ie