Author of the week

Terry Hayes

His readers might not know it, but Terry Hayes is now writing at an unprecedented pace, said Sophia Nguyen in The Washington Post. The veteran screenwriter and former reporter was a boy when he first dreamed of writing a novel and 61 when he finally did it, with the 600page 2013 hit spy thriller I Am Pilgrim. Ten years later, the British-born nomad finally had a follow-up, The Year of the Locust, which reached the U.S. just this month. Life, though, does intervene. He had been well into writing Pilgrim when he lost his brother and both parents in quick succession. “But I couldn’t stop,” he says. “I had a wife. We had four children.” So he kept at the project, day after day, only to discover when it was published and widely praised that achieving his childhood dream felt empty. “There was nobody there to share it with—nobody from the early days,” he says. “It was just me.” That feeling prompted Hayes to reprioritize. “It caused me to think about my own kids,” he says. “I could always write another book; I could never bring them up properly again.” So the next decade became about being a fully present dad, never missing a soccer match or school play. It was also about going down the rabbit hole that eventually yielded Locust, which before editing was far longer than War and Peace, said Michael Odell in the Daily Mail (U.K.). Hayes did recently complete a side project, secretly co-authoring Argylle, the movie tie-in novel that rumors briefly attributed to Taylor Swift. But for now, he says, his focus is on a direct sequel to I Am Pilgrim. “Cruel people, my children included, say to me, ‘Do you think you’ll finish it before you die?’”