Christopher Goffard is an author and a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. He also shared in the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service (the most distinguished Pulitzer) for his contributions to the L.A. Times’ coverage on the Bell scandal.

A Los Angeles native with an English degree from Cornell University, he started at The St. Petersburg Times in 1998, where he covered cops, city hall, and courts. His work on the Tampa courts beat gave rise to “The $40 Lawyer,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.

Since January 2006, he has been a general assignment reporter at the LA  Times, writing about everything from border warriors and prison gangs to the legacy of Watergate.

He was part of the reporting team that chronicled the Bell scandal in 2010, coverage which won the newspaper a George Polk Award for local reporting, the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, and the American Society of News Editors Distinguished Writing Award for Local Accountability Reporting.

Goffard’s first book, a literary crime novel called Snitch Jacket, was published by Random House in the United Kingdom and by Rookery Press in the United States. It was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel in 2008, has been translated into Italian, French and Norwegian, and is being developed as a film.

Publishers Weekly gave it a starred reviewed, The Bookseller called it “a brilliant first novel,” and the UK’s Guardian hailed it as “a thriller packed full of rich situations and even richer characters, and the fact that it is also very funny does not detract from the life-and-death action,” adding: ”This is a remarkably assured debut from Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard, who writes like an angel and plots like a demon.” In the L.A. Times, Sarah Weinman declared Snitch Jacket “a wonder of sentences that sing.”

His second book, a nonfiction work entitled You Will See Fire: A Search for Justice in Kenya, was recently published by W.W. Norton.

For more information on Chris, visit his official site here.

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