Alaska Author Night – Brian O’Donoghue

Fairbanks author Brian O’Donoghue’s latest book, “The Fairbanks Four: Murder, Injustice, and the Birth of a Movement” (Sourcebooks, 2025) tells a story only he can tell—how a scrappy journalism professor and his UAF students picked apart a case that wrongly pinned a white teen’s murder on four young indigenous men. Years later, authorities vacated the convictions in a settlement with the Four, though never apologized or admitted to any wrongdoing. The Four spent nearly two decades in prison.

O’Donoghue has written several other books, including two first-person accounts of racing both the Iditarod and Yukon Quest 1,000-mile sleddog races, which he finished last both times. As a journalist he worked at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Anchorage Daily News and KTVF-KTVA, as well as newspapers in New York and Baltimore. He taught at UAF for nearly 20 years, retiring in 2020.