LAWRENCE MALKIN

American writer and correspondent who spent a year in Deia and returned every year to write.

1930 – April 2022

Born in 1930 in Queens, N.Y. Author, journalist (and ghostwriter), Lawrence Malkin first came to Deià in 1962 to escape the distractions of New York City and write a novel. At the suggestion of his boyhood friend Fred Grunfeld, he literally stole a year from the hurly-burly of high politics: Larry had reported on Nikita Khruschchev banging his shoe on his desk at the United Nations. So isolated was Deià in those years that the rest of the world was three days into the Cuban missile crisis before we even heard about it here. Ever since then, he and his family have returned to their house in the Viña Vieja to recharge and for Larry to write books, his own or someone else’s His most recent book, Krueger’s Men: The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19, was translated into seven languages (including Spanish as El Falsifacador de Hitler); the story inspired the Oscar-winning film The Counterfeiters. 

In 1986 his book, The National Debt, foresaw the current failures of American economic policy. In between, he has collaborated on the memoirs of historic figures, among them Paul Volcker, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve; Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington for a quarter of a century, and the Communist master spy Markus Wolf, who headed East German foreign intelligence. He died in April of 2022 at the age of 91.

Other people & places to discover