Background and career
Harlan Coben (born January 4, 1962) is an American writer. Coben has won an Edgar Award, a Shamus Award, and an Anthony Award. His books have been translated into 46 languages and sold more than 90 million copies.
Harlan Coben was born on January 4, 1962, into a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, and was raised in Livingston, where he graduated from Livingston High School with future governor Chris Christie. His brother is the businessman Lawrence S. Coben. He studied political science at Amherst College, where he was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity.
After graduating in 1984, Coben worked in the travel industry, in a company owned by his grandfather. He wrote his first book, romantic suspense thriller Play Dead, which was accepted and published in 1990. It was followed by Miracle Cure in 1991. He then began writing a series of thrillers featuring a former basketball player turned sports agent, Myron Bolitar, who often investigates murders involving his clients. Tell No One, a stand-alone thriller, was published in 2001. A French film adaptation was released in 2006. Hold Tight, published on April 15, 2008, was his first book to debut at number 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list. In 2003, Coben published a short story about his father, who died of a heart attack at the age of 59 in 1988. Titled "The Key to My Father," the story was published in The New York Times on Father's Day, June 15, 2003. In 2025, Coben published his first co-authored novel, Gone Before Goodbye, with Reese Witherspoon.
Coben's books have been translated into 46 languages and sold more than 90 million copies. He has won an Edgar Award, a Shamus Award, and an Anthony Award. In 2010, Live Wire won a Spanish crime fiction award, the RBA Prize for Crime Writing, worth €125,000. In 2023, the Japanese edition of Win, translated by Toshiki Taguchi, was nominated for the Mystery Writers of Japan Award for Mystery Fiction in Translation.
Coben's first book to be adapted for the screen was Tell No One. Director Guillaume Canet made a French-language film, based on the book, titled Ne le dis à personne, in 2006. Coben's 2003 book No Second Chance became the basis for the 2015 French miniseries of the same name. Two years later the same happened to Just One Look. Coben is the creator of the British crime drama television show The Five, which first aired in April 2016 on the Sky 1 channel in the United Kingdom. Coben also created the French-British crime drama television show Safe, which premiered on Netflix in 190 countries on May 10, 2018. Coben often acts as executive producer on his television series, frequently through his company Final Twist Productions and Quay Street Productions. Several other television adaptations of Coben's work have since been made, in addition to original programming.
The first of Coben's works to receive the screen treatment was his 2001 novel Tell No One, which was adapted into a 2006 French film of the same name. The film was a box office success and was widely praised, being nominated for nine César Awards, and winning four. Two further novels were adapted as miniseries for France's TF1 broadcaster: 2015's No Second Chance and 2017's Just One Look. The 2016 Sky1 drama The Five was an original series created by Coben, who followed suit with the C8/Netflix show Safe.
