Will Leitch

Deadspin started in September 2005 as an independent sports blog written by Will Leitch, who left it in 2008 for New York magazine and has since filed for MLB.com, The New York Times, GQ and The Washington Post. How Lucky, his first novel for adults, came from Harper in May 2021. The narrator is Daniel, twenty-six, living in Athens, Georgia, with spinal muscular atrophy: he uses a wheelchair, cannot speak, and answers angry customers online for a regional airline from his front room. When a student called Ai-Chin disappears, Daniel is sure he watched her get into a tan Camaro outside his house, and his amateur digging takes him somewhere genuinely unsafe. The book won an Alex Award in 2022 and was shortlisted for an Edgar. Leitch grew up in Mattoon, Illinois, edited the Daily Illini at Illinois, and still lives in Athens.