Sarah Weinman is the author of The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, An Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece, which was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, BuzzFeed, The National Post, Literary Hub, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Vulture. It also won the Arthur Ellis Award for Excellence in Crime Writing. She worked on the book while in residence at MacDowell in 2017. She is also the editor of several anthologies, most recently Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning (Ecco, 2023).
She is the Crime & Mystery columnist at the New York Times Book Review, and her work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Esquire, the Washington Post, New Republic, the Guardian, Topic, Buzzfeed, and CrimeReads, among other outlets. Weinman also writes the “Crime Lady” newsletter, covering crime fiction, true crime, and all points in between. Weinman has been nominated for a National Magazine Award in Reporting.
At MacDowell in 2020, Weinman worked on The Convict and the Conservative. During her 2024 residency, she finished a draft of her third nonfiction book Without Consent (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2025), on the first major American spousal rape trial and its legal and emotional. She also worked on essays on the 20th century women crime writers Josephine Tey and Ethel Lina White.
Portrait by Anna Ty Bergman
