Jake Lamar


Jake Lamar is an African-American writer, novelist, playwright, and cultural critic living in Paris.
After graduating from Harvard University, Lamar spent six years writing for Time magazine. He has lived in Paris since 1993 and teaches creative writing at Sciences Po. At age 30, he published a memoir, Bourgeois Blues, in which he evoked his relationship with his father. With it, he won the Lyndhurst Prize. In 1993, he moved to Paris in the 18th arrondissement where he still resides.
After a near fatal heart problem in 2015, Lamar wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times on the quality of the socialist system of health care in France. His most recent work, Viper's Dream is a crime novel set in the jazz world of Harlem between the years 1936 and 1961. A version of Viper's Dream was broadcast as a 10-episode radio play in 2019. That production included many jazz tracks of the period. Viper's Dream was published in French as a novel by Rivages/Noir in 2021. Viper's Dream was published in the US by Crooked Lane Books in 2023.
In July 2024, Viper's Dream received the Crime Writers' Association Historical Dagger Award.
In December 2024, Das schwarze Chamäleon, the German translation of his novel If 6 Were 9, won the German Crime Fiction Award, Deutscher Krimipreis, in the international category.
In 2025, Viper's Dream was shortlisted for the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in the Fiction in Translation category.

Fiction in English

  • Bourgeois Blues
  • The Last Integrationist
  • Close to the Bone
  • If 6 Were 9
  • Rendezvous Eighteenth
  • Ghosts of Saint-Michel
  • ''Viper's Dream''

    Fiction in French

  • Le caméléon noir
  • Nous avions un rêve
  • New York Transfer
  • Rendez-vous dans le 18ème
  • Les Fantômes de Saint-Michel
  • Confessions d'un fils modèle
  • Postérité
  • ''Viper's Dream''

    Plays

  • Brothers in Exile
  • Brothers in Exile
  • ''Viper's Dream''

    Awards

  • Deutscher Krimipreis, 2024
  • Crime Writers' Association Historical Dagger Award, 2024
  • Lyndhurst Prize
  • Centre National du Livre grant
  • France's Grand Prize for best foreign thriller
  • Beaumarchais fellowship