Stephen Harrigan is the author of twelve books of fiction and non-fiction, including the New York Times bestselling novel The Gates of the Alamo and Remember Ben Clayton, which among other awards won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for best historical fiction from the Society of American Historians. Big Wonderful Thing, his sweeping narrative history of Texas, was published by the University of Texas Press in October 2019 and was named best non-fiction book of the year by the Philosophical Society of Texas. His most recent novel, The Leopard is Loose, was released by Knopf in 2022 and won the Philosophical Society’s fiction award. Harrigan’s work as a journalist and essayist has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and many other publications—especially Texas Monthly, for which he is a writer-at-large and long-time contributor. Many of his magazine pieces are collected in his career-spanning essay collection The Eye of the Mammoth and in the forthcoming An Anchor in the Sea of Time. Harrigan has received lifetime achievement awards from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Texas Book Festival and was presented in 2019 with the Texas Medal of Arts. His book Sorrowful Mysteries: The Shepherd Children of Fatima and the Fate of the Twentieth Century, will be published by Knopf in April, 2025.