Michael R. Sterling

Michael R. Sterling (London, 1972) is a British writer and journalist.

He began his career writing on social and political issues for various European publications before turning fully to fiction, where he found a more intimate and flexible way to explore the grey areas of human behaviour.

He is best known for the Blackies series, a collection of psychological thrillers marked by moral tension, emotional depth and a precise, almost cinematic style. Set across the United States and Europe, these novels examine the shadows of everyday life—those places where guilt, desire and silence intersect. Sterling’s work is characterised by its ethical ambiguity: his characters live constantly on the edge between innocence and complicity.

After several years exploring the human mind through crime and redemption, Sterling chose to open his narrative focus to a different kind of darkness: the one hidden beneath the streets of old Barcelona. Dividing his time between London and the Catalan capital, he undertook extensive research into archives, police records and oral testimonies to reconstruct the atmosphere of the former Barrio Chino, a territory of survival, secrecy and desire that defined the city’s first half of the twentieth century.

The result of that immersion is Diego Navajas, a novel that combines historical rigour with psychological realism, where memory becomes both refuge and weapon, and the city itself emerges as a central presence.

Today, Sterling continues to divide his time between London and Barcelona. His work will alternate new instalments of the Blackies series with stand-alone novels, expanding a coherent literary universe shaped by obsession, moral inheritance and the lasting weight of personal choices.