Gillian Flynn is an American novelist and screenwriter, born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1971, and the author of the psychological thrillers “Sharp Objects”, “Dark Places” and “Gone Girl”. All three have been adapted for the screen, and she wrote the screenplay for the 2014 film of “Gone Girl” herself.
Both of Flynn’s parents were educators: her mother taught reading comprehension and her father taught film. She took degrees in English and journalism at the University of Kansas and a master’s at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 1997. She joined Entertainment Weekly as a feature writer in 1998 and went on to become its television critic, a job she held until she was made redundant in December 2008.
She wrote “Sharp Objects” (2006) while still at the magazine. It follows a reporter investigating a series of murders in her home town, and it won the Crime Writers’ Association’s New Blood and Ian Fleming Steel Daggers. “Dark Places” (2009) concerns a woman who begins to doubt that her imprisoned brother murdered their family when she was a child.
“Gone Girl” (2012) is about Nick Dunne, whose wife Amy disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary. It spent eight weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list and had sold more than 15 million copies worldwide by 2016. David Fincher directed the film, with Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, and Flynn’s script won the Critics’ Choice Movie Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and was nominated for a Golden Globe and a BAFTA.
Her story “The Grownup” first appeared in the 2014 anthology “Rogues” under the title “What Do You Do?”, won the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, and was published on its own in 2015. “Dark Places” became a 2015 film starring Charlize Theron, and “Sharp Objects” became a 2018 HBO miniseries with Amy Adams, which Flynn co-wrote and executive produced.
Flynn also co-wrote the 2018 film “Widows” with its director Steve McQueen and was showrunner of the Amazon series “Utopia” (2020). In 2021 she was given her own imprint, Gillian Flynn Books, at the independent publisher Zando. She lives in Chicago, and as of 2025 was reported to be working on a fourth novel.
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Sharp Objects | 2006 |
| Dark Places | 2009 |
| Gone Girl | 2012 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| The Grownup | 2014 |
Photo: aphrodite-in-nyc, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).