Nic Pizzolatto

Nicholas Austin Pizzolatto (born October 18, 1975) is an American author, screenwriter, director, and producer.

Nicholas Austin Pizzolatto was born in New Orleans on October 18, 1975.

He grew up in a Catholic family of Italian-Americans.

His father, Nic Pizzolatto Jr., was an attorney.

At the age of five, he moved with his family to a rural area of Lake Charles, Louisiana.

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, graduating with a BA in English and philosophy.

He gave up writing following the death of a writing mentor and moved to Austin, Texas, where he worked as a bartender and technical writer for four years.

He later enrolled in an MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas, and received the Lily Peter Fellowship for poetry and Walton Fellowship in 2003.

In 2004, his work was among the finalists for the National Magazine Award in Fiction.

He graduated in 2005.

Pizzolatto wrote two short stories when he was completing his MFA at the University of Arkansas – "Ghost-Birds" and

"Between Here and the Yellow Sea" – which were sold to The Atlantic Monthly.

In 2005, Pizzolatto was named one of Poets & Writers magazine's best new writers.

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 was also named one of the top five fiction debuts of the year by Poets & Writers Magazine.

He also received an honorable mention from the Pushcart Prize, and his short story "Wanted Man" is included in Best American Mystery Stories 2009.

Pizzolatto's first novel, Galveston, was published by Scribner's in June 2010.

It was translated into many languages.

In 2010, Galveston earned him the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger, the French Academy's award for Best First Novel, Foreign.

It was also a 2010 Edgar Award finalist for best first novel.

Galveston also won third prize in the 2010 Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, and additionally won the 2011 Spur Award for Best First Novel from the Western Writers of America.

Pizzolatto adapted his 2010 novel Galveston for the 2018 film of the same name; however, he requested to be credited under the pseudonym Jim Hammett following director Mélanie Laurent's contributions to the screenplay, despite not being formally engaged as a writer on the project, feeling the final script did not reflect his own.

Producer Tyler Davidson confirmed the news to Entertainment Weekly, saying, "My personal opinion is that Nic did not feel the final script reflected his work as the sole credited writer, and his representatives advised us to credit him with his pseudonym."

In 2011, Pizzolatto wrote two episodes for the first season of the crime drama television series The Killing.

He was dissatisfied by the dynamic between the showrunner and the writers of the show and remarked, "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, Pizzolatto created an original television series called True Detective, which was sold to HBO and completed shooting in June 2013 with him as executive producer, sole writer, and showrunner.

He is best known for creating the HBO crime drama series True Detective (2014–present).

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, he was accused of plagiarizing the aforementioned sources.

A new season of True Detective premiered on June 21, 2015, with Pizzolatto again writing/co-writing all the episodes.

In late 2015, it was announced that Pizzolatto had signed a new deal with HBO through 2018.

In August 2016, HBO announced a potential new series written by Pizzolatto and starring Robert Downey Jr., centering on the character of investigative attorney Perry Mason.

Along with Richard Wenk, Pizzolatto co-wrote the screenplay for The Magnificent Seven (2016), a remake of the period-piece western The Magnificent Seven (1960) (which was itself a western remake of Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film Seven Samurai).

Antoine Fuqua directed, and the film, released on September 23, 2016, starred Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Vincent D'Onofrio, Lee Byung-hun, Ethan Hawke, Peter Sarsgaard and others.

On August 25, 2017, it was announced that Pizzolatto had dropped out of the production in order to focus on the third season of True Detective and that he was being replaced as the project's writer by Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald.

In December 2018, Pizzolatto revealed that he had assisted Deadwood creator David Milch in writing the screenplay for the film adaptation.