Richard Osman

Richard Osman (b. 1970) spent two decades as a British television producer and presenter — co-creating and co-hosting the quiz show Pointless — before The Thursday Murder Club (2020) made him one of the fastest-selling novelists in UK history. The series has sold well over ten million copies and reached Netflix as a 2025 film starring Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan.

“It’s so simple”

When court filings and The Atlantic revealed in early 2025 that Meta had trained its Llama models on the pirated LibGen library — Osman’s own books included — he became one of the loudest British voices in response. His post that copyright law “is not complicated at all” was shared tens of thousands of times, and he urged fellow writers to “have a good go” at Meta, acknowledging it would be “incredibly difficult” for individual authors to take on the company.

Osman signed the Society of Authors’ letter demanding the UK government summon Meta executives before Parliament, alongside Joanne Harris and Kazuo Ishiguro. In March 2026 he joined roughly 10,000 writers in Don’t Steal This Book — a protest volume organized by Ed Newton-Rex containing only the authors’ names followed by blank pages, handed out at the London Book Fair to dramatize a future where AI scrapes writers out of a living.