Michael Pye

Michael Pye writes for a living—as a novelist, journalist, historian, and sometimes broadcaster. He is English by birth but civilized by study in Italy and a newspaper apprenticeship in Scotland.

For 20 years he commuted between New York and Europe as a political and cultural columnist for British newspapers. He now lives with his partner John Holm in a tiny village in the forests of rural Portugal.

He has published a number of  books, and is proud of some of them: The Movie Brats, written with Lynda Myles, which was the first serious study of what the Scorsese generation did to Hollywood; King Over The Water, which exposed the machinations of the Duke of Windsor in the wartime Bahamas; Maximum City, the biography of New York which set out to find the roots and history of the city’s magic; The Drowning Room, a novel on the first whore of New York in its wild Dutch days; and, of course, Taking Lives.

Books in order of publication:

The Movie Brats: How The Film Generation Took Over Hollywood – 1979

Moguls: Inside The Business Of Show Business – 1980

The King Over The Water – 1981

Maximum City: The Biography of New York – 1993

The Drowning Room – 1996

The Pieces from Berlin – 2004

Taking Lives – 2004

The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe – 2015

Antwerp: The Glory Years – 2021