Satire as Medicine for What Ails Us

Carl Hiaasen has spent a lifetime railing against corrupt politicians and the wanton destruction of Florida’s natural riches. Along the way he’s become one of the country’s most successful novelists, not to mention one hell of a fly fisherman.

–Monte Burke, Garden & Gun magazine

There are a few things you should know about Carl Hiaasen. First, he is an avid fly-fisherman (he has even won some top competitions). Second, he is passionate about protecting the environment. Third, he loves to use his writing to skewer the corrupt, highlight the eccentric, and celebrate weirdness.

Not surprisingly, Florida is Hiaasen’s ideal habitat.

“Florida is a fertile setting for fiction because real life here is so bizarre,” he said in a 2023 interview. “The kind of stories I write couldn’t take place anywhere else.”

Hiaasen’s writing is funny, acerbic, and witty. Yet it also teems with outrage over the moral corruption and environmental destruction that surround us. Through satire and humor (and the oxymoronic genre of “crime fiction”) he peels back our layers of human ineptitude and helps us laugh at our sad predicament. And he’s been doing it (successfully) for a long time.

“If you picked the headlines from the five largest newspapers in Florida every day,” Hiaasen told an interviewer over a decade ago, “you could make a very solid case that the human race was slipping backward into the primal ooze. The species has not been elevated by much of what’s happened in the last 30 or 40 years. And obviously, it’s not just in Florida. The sort of thing that used to happen only in fiction can hardly compare to what’s in the news today.”

Raised in Plantation, FL, and educated toward journalism at Emory University and the University of Florida, Hiaasen (the last name is Norwegian) cut his teeth as a newspaper reporter at the Miami Herald. There, he developed an eye and an ear for absurdity, corruption, and injustice. “The idea of using suspense or a suspense novel as a framework for satire,” he once said, “is just useful to me and it's natural to me from doing newspaper work.”

He has written 17 novels solo, three as part of a tandem, and another seven aimed at younger readers. Some 21 of his novels have made it onto the New York Times bestseller lists, one of his young adult novels, Hoot, got a Newberry, and his last two novels, Wrecker, and Squeeze Me, debuted in the top and second slots of the NYT list when they came out in 2023 and 2020, respectively.

An interesting fact is that his books have been translated into 34 languages. One would think by focusing his fiction on Florida and its colorful characters, he would have a limited readership. But apparently quite the opposite – venality and corruption are clearly beloved the world over as objects for dark humor and absurd satire.

Carl Hiaasen will visit Festival Boca on March 5 for an evening of storytelling and commentary.