Writer Dan Fesperman pictured in his home. Lloyd Fox Photo.

Award-winning author Dan Fesperman from Baltimore will discuss how he made the leap from newspaper reporter to suspense novelist when he addresses the Eastern Shore Writers Association on April 8.

The group’s Second Saturday luncheon will be held at Suicide Bridge Restaurant in Hurlock from 12 noon – 1:30 p.m. The meeting is free and open to the public as well as to members of ESWA. Attendees will be responsible for purchasing their own meals.

Several of Fesperman’s books will be available for purchase on site from Mystery Loves Company, the Oxford, Maryland independent bookstore.

Fesperman was a long-time reporter and foreign correspondent for The Sun, reporting from a number of countries in Europe and the Middle East including Germany, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. He will discuss how he made the transition from journalism to fiction, first finding an agent and then having his first book acquired by major publishing houses on both sides of the Atlantic.

He will also talk about how and why he has incorporated the Eastern Shore of Maryland into several of his books, including substantial portions of his 2014 thriller about Predator drones, Unmanned.

Fesperman’s debut novel, Lie in the Dark, was published first in the UK by No Exit Press (1999) and then in the US by Vintage and Soho Press. Set in war-torn Sarajevo, where Fesperman had filed dispatches during the Yugoslav civil war, it was praised as “a great novel” by Scottish novelist Ian Rankin and as “one of the best books I’ve read in a long time” by the reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph of London. It won the John Creasey Dagger for best first novel from the UK Crime Writers’ Association.

Since then, he has published nine more novels, which have been translated into ten languages. The Small Boat of Great Sorrows won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for best thriller (2003) from the Crime Writers’ Association. The Prisoner of Guantánamo won the 2006 Hammett Award from the North American branch of the International Association of Crime Writers, while USA Today selected it as the best mystery/thriller novel of 2006. His latest book, The Letter Writer, was selected as one of 2016’s Ten Best Mysteries by the New York Times Book Review.

In 2016, Fesperman was named recipient of the Author Award from the Maryland Library Association. He and his wife, Liz Bowie, a Sun reporter, live in Baltimore. They have two grown children.