Edna Buchanan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who covered crime for nearly two decades at the Miami Herald. She also wrote mystery novels featuring a crime reporter as the protagonist and non-fiction books based on her experiences. She did not attend college and learned journalism on the job. Despite reporting on 3,000 murders, she was dedicated to giving voice to victims. She has won several prestigious journalism awards and is an animal lover who has been divorced twice.
Edna Buchanan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who has made her mark on the Miami Herald for nearly two decades on police beatings. After winning the Pulitzer in 1986, she went on to write a series of mystery novels whose heroine, Cuban-American Britt Montero, is also a crime reporter in Miami. In interviews, Edna Buchanan has denied that the character of Britt Montero is her alter ego, arguing that the fictional heroine participates much more actively in her news than she has ever been in hers. Edna Buchanan has also written several non-fiction books based on her experiences with crime in Miami, including The Corpse Had a Familiar Face.
She was born in 1939 in Paterson, New Jersey. From the age of 7, she grew up in a single parent household. Her father, who worked in a factory, had abandoned his wife and daughter. Money was tight, and Edna Buchanan worked part-time jobs throughout her teens to earn extra money. After high school, she wired switchboards to Paterson in the same factory where her mother worked.
Edna Buchanan did not attend college or obtain any journalism training other than what she learned on the job. She began reporting after moving from New Jersey to Florida, where she learned the Miami Beach Daily Sun was hiring her. The first job she’d applied for, the Miami branch of the Paterson company where she’d done electrical panel wiring, wasn’t hiring her.
After going through the Miami Herald, she entered the police arena and made it her own. In 1970s journalism circles, it was unusual for a woman to cover crime, homicide, and the morgue, and it wasn’t a pace many stayed in for long before moving on to another area of journalism. Despite the horror of what she has been called upon to report, including 3,000 murders over her career, she has been dedicated to giving voice to victims for 18 years. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, she has also won the George Polk Award, a prestigious journalism award from Long Island University, and the Green Eyeshade Excellence in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Her Mysteries have been nominated twice for the Edgar Award.
Edna Buchanan is an avid animal lover who has owned numerous pets, all rescued strays, including a rabbit, dogs and cats. She has been divorced twice. She met her first husband, James Buchanan, while working on her first newspaper job. Her second husband was a Miami Beach cop, Emmett Miller, who became police chief.
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