Don Winslow

Don Winslow is one of those writers who makes you genuinely angry at how good he is. Born in New York on Halloween 1953 — very on-brand for a guy who spends his career dragging the darkest corners of American crime into the light — he spent decades building toward his masterpiece run: the Cartel Trilogy. The Power of the Dog, The Cartel, and The Border are as close to a Great American Novel about the War on Drugs as anything out there, and I say that without reservation. The Shamus Award in 2000 and the German Crime Fiction Award in 2011 confirm that both sides of the Atlantic caught on. When he announced he was retiring from fiction to focus on political activism, I was honestly heartbroken — but also kind of awed that he walked away at the peak of his powers to go fight a different fight.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

Don Winslow

Name (Japanese)

ドン・ウィンズロウ

Reading

どん・うぃんずろう

Born

October 31, 1953 (age 72)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Scorpio / Snake

Origin

New York City, New York, United States

Occupation

screenwriter / novelist / writer / actor / director

University

University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Awards & achievements

• 2011 German Crime Fiction Award
• 2000 Shamus Award

• Official sitehttps://don-winslow.com
• Xhttps://x.com/donwinslow
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%20Winslow
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%89%E3%83%B3%E3%83%BB%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A3%E3%83%B3%E3%82%BA%E3%83%AD%E3%82%A6
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q908571

Tags

• New York
• screenwriter
• novelist
• writer

Last updated

2026-06-02

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.