Starling Lawrence is the editor-in-chief at the W.W. Norton publishing company. After many years as an editor, he had a chance to see the publishing business from a different perspective, when he became a published author in 1996. Legacies is a collection of short stories, each focusing on an illuminating moment or event that changes the course of a character's life. Legacies was followed by Montenegro, a historical novel set in the Balkans, when Montenegro was a small but independent principality. A combination espionage thriller and love story, Montenegro takes place in 1908, against the formation of the "Black Hand", a Serb terrorist group that was responsible for the 1914 murder of the… Austrian archduke in Sarajevo, an event that precipitated World War I. Lawrence has received The Sewanee Review's Lytle Prize and the Virginia Quarterly Review's Balch prize for his fiction. He lives in New York City.