THE ROGER HOBBS STORY

A Life In Letters

Portland to New York. Reed to Knopf. Twenty-eight years that contained a lifetime.

Roger Hobbs was born in Portland, Oregon in 1988. From the moment he could read, he was obsessed with the architecture of stories — how a sentence could turn a corner, how a character could be defined by the things they refused to say.

He wrote his first play at fifteen. By nineteen, that play had been professionally produced. At twenty, he was published in The New York Times. At twenty-one, a Hollywood studio optioned his work.

He enrolled at Reed College and majored in literary studies, where his senior thesis became the manuscript that would become Ghostman. He graduated in 2010 with the manuscript already in the hands of agents.

I didn't want to write a book that pretended to be respectable. I wanted to write a book that knew exactly what it was — and was unapologetically good at it.

Roger Hobbs · 2013

In 2011, Knopf bought Ghostman in a major two-book deal. When the novel was published in 2013, it became an international bestseller, was translated into more than a dozen languages, and won the Crime Writers' Association's Ian Fleming Steel Dagger — making Roger, at twenty-five, the youngest writer ever to win the award.

Vanishing Games, published in 2015, took the Ghostman to Macau and confirmed Roger as one of the most distinct voices in modern crime fiction.

He died in November 2016 at the age of twenty-eight. He was working on a third novel.

The work he left behind — taut, propulsive, intelligent, alive — remains in print around the world. This site exists to honor it, and him.