Photo: Nicole Nodland

D. László Conhaim is passionate about discovering stories and people somehow lost to history—and to inspire or renew public interest in them. His socially conscious, exhaustively researched novels in recent years have focused on the multiracial struggle for the American West, emphasizing issues of family, identity, and belonging.

 

Conhaim’s Paul Robeson-inspired Western All Man’s Land (Broken Arrow Press, 2019) was selected Finalist Best Novel in the Western Writers of America Spur Awards, and was a “Maverick” winner in the Will Rogers Medallion Awards. His 2021 novel The Unredeemed (a sequel to 2017’s Comanche Captive) was a Best Novel winner in the Will Rogers Medallion Awards and Best Novel finalist in the Western Fictioneers’ Peacemaker Awards. The Unredeemed chronicles the Buffalo Soldier Tragedy of 1877 and demonstrates how black Indian captives mattered less—if at all—to authorities. Conhaim’s first professional writing credit was a two-part 1986 interview in Los Angeles and Tokyo with Japanese screen legend Toshiro Mifune (for Minneapolis’ City Pages), followed by an interview with frequent costar Tatsuya Nakadai for USC’s Daily Trojan. In 1995, Conhaim co-founded The Prague Revue, the longest-running literary journal to serve the community of international writers in Prague.

 

For TPR, he wrote a fictional remembrance of Miguel de Unamuno, “Feeling into Don Miguel,” which Gore Vidal “read with delight” and which Alexander Zaitchik (Rolling Stone, The Nation) called “masterful . . . a first-rate piece of writing by any standard” in Think Magazine.

 

In June 2020, Broken Arrow Press released new ebook and paperback editions of Comanche Captive (recommended by Library Journal).

 

In 2023, Broken Arrow Press broke new ground on ancient Rome with Conhaim’s novelization of a true story never before told in fiction—the Bacchic Conspiracy—as recounted in Memoirs of Spurius, which Midwest Book Review has called "a gem" and Kirkus Reviews says is "grippingly dramatized . . . keenly imaginative . . . A fine amalgam of historical scholarship and literary invention." Critics have likened the author's achievements in Spurius to works by Gore Vidal and Umberto Eco.

 

Conhaim was born in the United States and lives in Israel.