My name is Paddy Hirsch. I’m a writer, a journalist, and an explainer.
I’ve worked in news for nearly 20 years, but recently I’ve been writing fiction. My latest novel, Hudson’s Kill is an historical thriller, set in New York in 1803. It has themes of racism, corruption and criminality, set against the backdrop of the city fathers’ plans to develop the island of Manhattan.
Hudson’s Kill is the second novel in the Lawless New York series featuring Marshal Justy Flanagan, a New York-born Irish American who lives an uneasy existence with one foot in City Hall and the other on the New York waterfront. The first book in the series, The Devil’s Half Mile, is set four years earlier, in 1799. The Devil’s Half Mile is a nickname for Wall Street, and the action in the story centers on a particularly venal financial crime.
I’m also the author of a book called Man vs Markets, Economics Explained, Plain and Simple. It’s a lighthearted, jargon-free guide to the financial markets, aimed at regular people who just want to understand what on earth happens on Wall Street.
I’ve worked at NPR, on The Indicator from Planet Money, and at Marketplace, where I was the host of The Marketplace Whiteboard. It’s an online video series, featuring pithy, two-minute explainers of financial terms and was a Webby honoree in 2009. I was awarded a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University in 2010, and I was an Edward R Murrow award winner in 2014
I got my start in journalism with an internship at the BBC in Glasgow, Scotland. I became a field producer for CNBC in Hong Kong and later was a consultant to the Open Broadcast Network in Bosnia. I’ve worked as an editor for Direct Capital Markets, Institutional Investor Newsletters, Standard & Poor’s, and the Vietnam Economic Times.
Prior to becoming a journalist, I served for nearly ten years as an officer in the Royal Marines. I went to school at Campbell College in Belfast and received a bachelor’s degree in French and International Studies from the University of Warwick.
I was born in Weymouth, England, raised in Ireland and I now live in Los Angeles. During my free time, I like to run, surf and climb big hills.
