Greg Iles was born in Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany, where his physician father ran the U.S. Embassy Medical Clinic during the height of the Cold War. Iles spent his youth in Natchez, Mississippi, and graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1983.
Iles spent several years as a guitarist, singer, and songwriter in the band Frankly Scarlet. He quit the band after he was married and began working on his first novel, Spandau Phoenix, a thriller about Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess. Primarily set in the Deep South, his later novels have been made into films, translated into more than 20 languages, and published in more than 35 countries worldwide. In 2011, Iles was seriously injured in a traffic accident near Natchez. He sustained life-threatening injuries, was put into an induced coma, and lost his right leg below the knee. During his three-year recovery, he wrote three novels set in Natchez, Mississippi, that feature former prosecutor Penn Cage.
Iles was a member of the literary amateur musical group The Rock Bottom Remainders, which included authors Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson, Stephen King, Scott Turow, Amy Tan, Mitch Albom, Roy Blount, Jr., Matt Groening, and James McBride, among others. As part of the group, he co-authored Hard Listening (2013), an ebook combining a variety of genres and media to give readers a view into the private lives of the authors/mus…
