about

Duncan Murrell is a writer and editor living in Pittsboro, North Carolina. He is a graduate of Cornell University, where he studied history and creative writing, and was lucky enough to study with Frederick Ahl and James McConkey. He served four years as a Marine Corps artillery officer and later received a master's in journalism from Northwestern University. Since then he's worked as a newspaper reporter, a magazine writer, a golf driving range attendant, and an acquisitions editor at Algonquin Books.

As a journalist, he's worked at newspapers in Alabama, Washington, D.C., and North Carolina, in addition to writing for Harper's, Poets and Writers, The Oxford American, Mother Jones, Men's Fitness, and other magazines. He has covered the crime beat, science, higher education, Congress (defense and intelligence), the Pentagon, and the arts. In 1997 the Associated Press named him the best young newspaper writer in North Carolina.

In five years as an editor at Algonquin Books, he acquired and edited two prize-winning, international bestsellers (Gap Creek, by Robert Morgan; Godforsaken Sea, by Derek Lundy). He has been recognized for his work in a Poets and Writers profile of young editors, (Sept.-Oct. 2001) and in a long interview published in the book, Agents, Editors, and You (Writer's Digest Books, 2002).

In 2002 Murrell formed Rattlejar, an editorial services firm. He is currently writing a book on outlaw culture, editing manuscripts for publishers and agents, and writing for magazines.