Writing
CURRENT BIO
Larry D. Sweazy is the author of twenty books: nineteen novels and one short story collection. He won the WWA (Western Writers of America) Spur award for Best Short Fiction in 2005 and for Best Paperback Original in 2013. He also won the 2011 and 2012 Will Rogers Medallion Award for Western Fiction for books in the Josiah Wolfe series. He was nominated for a Derringer award in 2007 (for the short story "See Also Murder") and was a finalist in the Best Books of Indiana literary competition in 2010. Larry was awarded the Best Books of Indiana in 2011 for The Scorpion Trail. And in 2013, Larry received the inaugural Elmer Kelton Fiction Book of the Year for The Coyote Tracker, presented by the AWA (Academy of Western Artists). He also won the 2019 Willa Literary Award (Best Original Softcover), and was shortlisted for 2020 Indiana Authors Award, Genre category--both for See Also Proof. He won the 2020 WF Peacemaker Best Western Award for The Return of the Wolf. His first Trusty Dawson novel, Lost Mountain Pass was a 2022 WWA Spur Award finalist, a 2022 WF Peacemaker Award finalist, and a 2022 Will Rogers Medallion Award finalist. Winter Seeks Out the Lonely was a 2022 Will Rogers Medallion Award medalist and was shortlisted for the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. His books have been translated by major publishers in Italy and Turkey. Larry has also published forty short stories, and they have appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine; The Adventure of the Missing Detective: And 25 of the Year's Finest Crime and Mystery Stories!; Boys' Life; Hardboiled, Hoosier Noir, and several other publications and anthologies. He lives in Noblesville, Indiana with his wife, Rose, and is hard at work on his next story.
About Larry
My writing roots
Larry D. Sweazy (pronounced Sway-zee) was born in and grew up in the Anderson, Indiana area. He watched a lot of 1960s westerns like Bonanza, The Rifleman, and the Wild, Wild, West as a kid. He also liked Batman, Star Trek, and The Twilight Zone, Baretta, and most of the 1970s cop shows. He was an early reader, picking up whatever paperbacks were laying around the house, whether they were over his head or not. Like a lot of writers, Larry was restless and worked a lot of jobs; he served in the U.S. Air Force, was a restaurant manager, insurance salesman, and janitor, until he began working in the publishing industry as a back-of-the-book indexer in 1998. Books, movies, and TV shows provided Larry with an escape from the troubles of every day life, and in his early twenties, he began to think he might be able to tell stories and become a writer. He was 49 when he published his first novel, The Rattlesnake Season.
Workshops
Larry also teaches writing workshops based on his twenty-five years of experience working fulltime in the publishing industry. He has previously served on the faculty and board of directors for the Midwest Writers Workshop, and the faculty for the Indiana Writers Center. As a speaker and workshop leader, Larry speaks regularly at libraries, schools, community centers, and other venues across the country. For information concerning workshops email Larry directly at larrysweazy@prodigy.net.