Nic Pizzolatto Biography

Nic Pizzolatto (born October 18, 1975) is an American novelist, screenwriter, and producer, best known for writing and creating the television show True Detective.

Early life and education

Pizzolatto, the middle child of four, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Nick Pizzolatto Jr. and Sheila Pizzolatto (ne Sierra). He is of Italian descent. His brother, Nath Pizzolatto, was a professional online poker player. Pizzolatto grew up poor in a working-class Catholic family in New Orleans and at age 5, he and his family moved to the rural area of Lake Charles, Louisiana. He described his hometown in unflattering terms: "Lots of poor, stupid people there, lots of drinking and fighting and cheating. Also lots of fanatical religion and illiteracy. It"?s a rough place, and you grow up fighting." Pizzolatto had an unhappy childhood and said, "where I grew up gave you violence as a common language, as much a part of daily life as the French Creole the Cajuns spoke. Violence as a legitimate rhetoric in daily life." He has since been estranged from his parents and never visited Lake Charles, explaining that "there's a certain amount of trauma tied to that, largely physical trauma." Growing up in a household that didn't have books or "any other kind of intellectual materials", he spent his free time in the woods and around nature. He became interested in art, and said he used it "to escape my surroundings."

He graduated from St. Louis Catholic High School in 1993 and left home when he was 17. He attended Louisiana State University on a visual arts scholarship. After he graduated from LSU with a B.A. in English and philosophy, his fiction professor and mentor died. Pizzolatto gave up writing and moved to Austin, Texas, where he worked as a bartender and technical writer for four years. He later enrolled in an MFA program at the University of Arkansas, and received the Lily Peter Fellowship for poetry and Walton fellowship in 2003. He graduated in 2005.

Career

Fiction and short story writing

He wrote two short stories, which were sold to The Atlantic Monthly. In 2004, his work was among the finalists for the National Magazine Award in Fiction.

The author of two books, he taught fiction and literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Chicago, and DePauw University before leaving academia in 2010. In 2005, Pizzolatto was the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He moved to California to pursue a screenwriting career in the summer of 2010.

His first novel, Galveston, was published by Scribner's in June 2010. It sold translations in France, Hong Kong, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Czech Republic, Hungary, Norway, Bulgaria, Poland, Russia, Portugal and Arab countries. In 2005, Pizzolatto was named one of Poets & Writers magazine's best new writers. In 2010, Galveston earned him the Prix du Premier Roman tranger, the French Academy"?s award for Best First Novel, Foreign. It was also a 2010 Edgar Award finalist for best first novel.

Television writing

In 2011, he wrote two episodes for the first season of the crime drama television series The Killing. Pizzolatto was dissatisfied by the dynamic between the showrunner and the writers of the show; he remarked that, "I want to be the guiding vision. I don't do well serving someone else's vision." He decided to leave the show after spending two weeks in the writers room on the show's second season.

In 2012, he created an original television series called True Detective, which was sold to HBO and completed shooting in June 2013, with Pizzolatto as executive producer, sole writer, and showrunner. It premiered in January 2014, and became the most watched freshman show in the network's history. The show was critically acclaimed and was so popular the finale crashed HBO's HBO Go streaming service. Pizzolatto listed several influences on the show's first season: philosophy books such as Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Eugene Thacker's In The Dust Of This Planet, Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound, Jim Crawford's Confessions of an Antinatalist, and David Benatar's Better Never To Have Been. Pizzolatto also mentions horror authors Laird Barron, John Langan, Simon Strantzas, and Ligotti.

In August 2014, an article alleged that Pizzolatto plagiarized Thomas Ligotti's book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, citing eleven examples that included word-for-word quotations. HBO and Pizzolatto made statements that they considered the allegations groundless, arguing that philosophical ideas can never be plagiarized. The issue remains currently unresolved.

Awards

The first two short stories Pizzolatto submitted sold simultaneously to The Atlantic. His collection of short fiction Between Here and the Yellow Sea was long-listed for the 2006 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and named one of the top five fiction debuts of the year by Poets & Writers Magazine.

Pizzolatto was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Fiction in 2004. He received an honorable mention from the Pushcart Prize, and his story "Wanted Man" is included in Best American Mystery Stories 2009. Galveston won third prize in the 2010 Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 Edgar Award for best first novel. It won the 2011 Spur Award for Best First Novel from the Western Writers of America.

In France, Galveston was awarded the Prix du Premier Roman tranger (Best Foreign First Novel) for 2011, by a jury of literary critics.

Personal life

Pizzolatto lives in Ojai, California with his wife, Amy, and daughter since 2010.

Filmography

Television series

Writer

Year	Show	Season	Episode	Episode number	Original airdate	Notes
2013	The Killing	1	"What You Have Left"	6	May 1, 2011
			"Orpheus Descending"	13	June 19, 2011	Written by Pizzolatto & Veena Sud
2014	True Detective	1	"The Long Bright Dark"	1	January 12, 2014
			"Seeing Things"	2	January 19, 2014
			"The Locked Room"	3	January 26, 2014
			"Who Goes There"	4	February 9, 2014
			"The Secret Fate of All Life"	5	February 16, 2014
			"Haunted Houses"	6	February 23, 2014
			"After You've Gone"	7	March 2, 2014
			"Form and Void"	8	March 9, 2014

Works or publications

• Pizzolatto, Nic. 2004. "1987, The Races". The Missouri Review. 27, no. 1: 83-93. (short story)
• Pizzolatto, Nic. 2005. "Haunted Earth". The Iowa Review. 35, no. 2: 14-24. (short story)
• Pizzolatto, Nic. Between Here and the Yellow Sea: Stories. San Francisco, CA: MacAdam/Cage, 2006. ISBN 978-1-596-92168-9 (a collection of 9 short stories)
• Pizzolatto, Nic. 2009. "Graves of Light". Ploughshares. 35, no. 4: 140-156. (short story)
• Pizzolatto, Nic. Galveston: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2010. ISBN 978-1-439-16664-2
• True Detective (TV series), HBO. January, 2014.

Notes and references