Greg Iles, Mississippi author of 'Natchez Burning' trilogy, dies of cancer at 65

Audio By Carbonatix

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Greg Iles, the Mississippi author of the “Natchez Burning” trilogy and other works, has died. He was 65.

Iles died Friday after a decades-long battle with the blood cancer multiple myeloma, his literary agent Dan Conaway posted Saturday on Facebook.

Initially diagnosed with the incurable condition in 1996, he kept his illness private until completing his final novel, “Southern Man,” which was published in 2024.

Iles was born in Germany but moved to Natchez, Mississippi, with his family when he was just three years old and developed a deep connection with the region. Many of his stories are set in Mississippi, including the “Natchez Burning” trilogy, historical fiction suspense novels exploring race and class in the 1960s Jim Crow South.

Conaway described Iles as “warm, funny, fearless, and completely sui generis.”

“To be on the other end of the phone as he talked through character and plot, problem-solving on the fly, was to be witness to genius at work, plain and simple,” he wrote on Saturday. “As a writer he fused story-craft, bone-deep humanity, and a growing sense of moral and political responsibility with the ferocious precisions of a whirling dervish or a master watchmaker.”

In March 2011, Iles suffered a ruptured aorta and a partial leg amputation and spent eight days in a medically induced coma after another driver struck his car on Highway 61 near Natchez. He eventually recovered.

Iles performed with the musical group The Rock Bottom Remainders along with popular authors Stephen King, Amy Tan and others.