Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Agents of Innocence | 1987 |
| Siro | 1991 |
| The Bank of Fear | 1994 |
| A Firing Offense | 1997 |
| The Sun King | 1999 |
| Body of Lies | 2007 |
| The Increment | 2009 |
| Bloodmoney | 2011 |
| The Director | 2014 |
| The Quantum Spy | 2017 |
| The Paladin | 2020 |
| Phantom Orbit | 2024 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy (With: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft) | 2008 |
About David Ignatius
David Ignatius is an American journalist and novelist, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1950. He is an associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post and the author of twelve espionage novels, among them “Body of Lies” (2007), which Ridley Scott made into a film.
Ignatius grew up in Washington, D.C., where his father, Paul Ignatius, was Secretary of the Navy from 1967 to 1969 and a president of The Washington Post. He studied political theory at Harvard, graduating in 1972, and took a diploma in economics at King’s College, Cambridge. After a spell as an editor at the Washington Monthly he spent ten years as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, covering the steel industry, the Justice Department, the CIA and the Senate. From 1980 to 1983 he was the paper’s Middle East correspondent, reporting on the wars in Lebanon and Iraq.
He joined The Washington Post in 1986 and has been editor of its Outlook section, foreign editor and assistant managing editor for business news. His column on global politics and international affairs began in 1999 and won the Gerald Loeb Award for Commentary in 2000. He was executive editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2000 to 2002, and in 2018 he won a George Polk Award for his coverage of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
The novels draw on that reporting. His first, “Agents of Innocence” (1987), was at one time described by the CIA on its own website as “a novel but not fiction”. “Body of Lies” follows Roger Ferris, a CIA officer who sets a trap for the terrorist behind a series of car bombings in Europe, using a deception modelled on the Second World War’s Operation Mincemeat. The 2008 film starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe. Film rights to “The Increment” (2009) were bought by Disney and the producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and “The Director” (2014) was acquired by Columbia Pictures.
His books are all standalone stories. “The Quantum Spy” (2017) is about the race between the United States and China to build a quantum computer, and “The Paladin” followed in 2020. His most recent novel is “Phantom Orbit” (2024), which begins with a Russian student in Beijing who finds an unsolved puzzle in the writings of the astronomer Johannes Kepler. Ignatius also moderated the conversations between Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft published as “America and the World” in 2008. He lives in Washington with his wife, Eve Thornberg.
Photo: Kuhlmann / MSC, CC BY 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).