About Dr. Olaf Kroneman

Detroit, the city of Olaf Kroneman’s youth, was muscle cars, Motown music, and Tiger baseball. He came of age there — living through the 1967 riots and the Algiers Motel incident, events that sent him searching to understand racism. At sixteen he took up boxing and fought in the Detroit Golden Gloves.

He attended Michigan State University through the 1960s and ’70s, graduating from the MSU College of Human Medicine in 1977 with an MD. He interned at the Mayo Clinic, completed a residency in internal medicine at the University of Virginia, and a fellowship in kidney disease and clinical nutrition at Massachusetts General Hospital under a Harvard appointment.

He has practiced medicine in Detroit since 1983, and his patients and colleagues inspire — and sometimes disturb — his fiction. “I tell stories of mystery and suspense; it’s fun. I draw on my long career in the practice of medicine. I like to tell a good story, but I would also like to expose the reader to a pernicious and perhaps unalterable change in healthcare: the domination of the doctor–patient relationship by computers and bureaucrats.”

His short fiction has won the Winning Writers Sports Fiction and Essay Contest (“Fight Night”) and the Writer’s Digest short story competition (“The Recidivist”), and earned a 2010 Pushcart Prize nomination (“A Battlefield Decision”). His debut novel, Detroit Heroic, is forthcoming from Heliotrope Books. He lives in Birmingham, Michigan.