Robert Dennis Harris (born 7 March 1957 in
NottinghamNottingham is a city and unitary authority in the East Midlands. It is located in the ceremonial county of Nottinghamshire, England and is one of only eight members of the English Core Cities Group....
) is an
EnglishEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
novelist. He is a former journalist and
BBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation, usually referred to by its abbreviation as the "BBC", is the longest established and largest broadcaster in the world...
TVTelevision is a widely used telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images, either monochromatic or color, usually accompanied by sound. "Television" may also refer specifically to a television set, television programming or television transmission...
reporterA reporter is a type of journalist who researches and presents information in certain types of mass media.Reporters gather their information in a variety of ways, including tips, press releases, sources and witnessing events. They perform research through interviews, public records, and other...
.
Early life
Harris spent his childhood in a small rented house on a Nottingham council estate. His ambition to become a writer arose at an early age, from visits to the local printing plant where his father worked. Harris went to Belvoir High School in
BottesfordBottesford is a village and civil parish within the Melton district of Leicestershire, England. It lies about east of Nottingham and north of Melton Mowbray. The village is the largest in the Vale of Belvoir and is near to Belvoir Castle, home to the Duke and Duchess of Rutland.Bottesford has a...
, and then
King Edward VII SchoolKing Edward VII School is a comprehensive secondary school in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire in the United Kingdom. Formerly, the school was a public grammar school...
,
Melton MowbrayMelton Mowbray is a town in the Melton borough of Leicestershire, England. It is to the northeast of Leicester, and southeast of Nottingham...
, where a hall is now named after him. There he wrote plays and edited the school magazine. Harris read English literature at
Selwyn College, CambridgeSelwyn College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. It was founded in 1882, in memory of the Rt Reverend George Augustus Selwyn , the first Bishop of New Zealand and Bishop of Lichfield . The college was founded by subscription, with an explicitly Christian mission...
, where he was president of the Union and editor of the student newspaper
VarsityVarsity is the older of Cambridge University's main student newspapers . It has been published continuously since 1947, and is one of only three fully independent student newspapers in the UK. It appears every Friday around Cambridge.- History:Varsity is one of Britain's oldest student newspapers...
.
Career
On coming down from Cambridge, Harris joined the BBC and worked on news and current affairs programes such as
PanoramaPanorama is the longest-running current affairs documentary series in the world. Launched on 11 November 1953 on BBC Television, it focuses on investigative journalism. Daily Mail reporter Pat Murphy was the original presenter, only lasting one episode after accidentally broadcasting a technical...
and
NewsnightNewsnight is a BBC Television current affairs programme noted for its in-depth analysis and often robust cross-examination of senior politicians. Jeremy Paxman has been its main presenter for almost two decades....
. In 1987, at the age of thirty, he became political editor of
The ObserverThe Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In about the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a left-liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-History:The...
. He later wrote regular columns for
The Sunday TimesThe Sunday Times is a Sunday broadsheet newspaper, distributed in the United Kingdom. The Sunday Times is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News International, which is in turn owned by News Corporation. Times Newspapers also owns The Times, but the two papers were founded...
and
The Daily TelegraphThe Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Colonel Arthur B. Sleigh in June 1855 as the Daily Telegraph and Courier...
.
Non-fiction (1982-1990)
Harris's first book appeared in 1982.
A Higher Form Of Killing, a study of chemical and biological warfare, was written with fellow BBC journalist and close friend
Jeremy PaxmanJeremy Dickson Paxman is a British journalist, author and television presenter. He has worked for the BBC since 1977. He is noted for a forthright and abrasive interviewing style...
. Other non-fiction works followed:
Gotcha, the Media, the Government and the Falklands Crisis (1983),
The Making of Neil Kinnock (1984),
Selling Hitler (1986), an investigation of the
Hitler DiariesIn April 1983, the West German news magazine Stern published extracts from what purported to be the diaries of Adolf Hitler, known as the Hitler Diaries , which were subsequently revealed to be forgeries...
scandal, and
Good and Faithful Servant (1990), a study of
Bernard InghamSir Bernard Ingham is a journalist and former civil servant who is best known as Margaret Thatcher's Chief Press Secretary whilst she was Prime Minister. Today Ingham lectures in Public Relations at Middlesex University in London...
,
Margaret ThatcherMargaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher LG, OM, PC, FRS served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She is the only woman to have held either post....
's press secretary.
First historical fiction (1992-1999)
Harris's million-selling first novel
FatherlandFatherland is a bestselling 1992 thriller novel by the English writer and journalist Robert Harris, which doubles as a work of alternate history...
in 1992, an alternate history set in a world where Germany has won World War II, enabled him to become a novelist full-time. The novel was filmed by HBO in 1994. His second novel
EnigmaEnigma is a novel by Robert Harris, about Tom Jericho, a young mathematician trying to break the Germans' "Enigma" ciphers during World War II. It was adapted to film in 2001...
in 1995, was about the breaking of the Nazi
EnigmaAn Enigma machine is any of a family of related electro-mechanical rotor machines used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. The first Enigma was invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I...
code. It, too, was
filmedEnigma is a 2001 British film about the Enigma codebreakers of Bletchley Park in World War II. The film, directed by Michael Apted, stars Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet...
with
Dougray ScottStephen Dougray Scott is a Scottish actor.-Early life:The son of Elma, a nurse, and Alan Scott, an actor and salesperson, Scott attended Auchmuty High School...
and
Kate WinsletKate Elizabeth Winslet is an English actress and occasional singer. Winslet made her film debut starring in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures...
starring and a screenplay by
Tom StoppardSir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, FRSL is a British playwright. He has written plays such as The Coast of Utopia, Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Rock 'n' Roll...
.
Archangel (1998) was another international best seller. It was made into a
BBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation, usually referred to by its abbreviation as the "BBC", is the longest established and largest broadcaster in the world...
mini-series in 2005, starring future
James BondJames Bond 007 is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. The character has also been used in the longest running and most financially successful English language film franchise to date, starting in 1962 with Dr...
actor
Daniel CraigDaniel Wroughton Craig is an English actor and film producer. His early film roles included The Power of One, A Kid in King Arthur's Court and the television episodes Sharpe's Eagle, Zorro and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles: Daredevils of the Desert...
.
Roman fiction (2003 onwards)
In 2003 Harris turned his attention to
ancient RomeAncient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea, it became one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
with his acclaimed
PompeiiPompeii is a novel by author and journalist Robert Harris published by Random House in 2003. It is a blend of fictional characters with the real-life eruption of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, 79 that overwhelmed Pompeii and its surrounding towns. Pompeii is especially notable for the author's...
, yet another international best-seller. He followed this in 2006 with
ImperiumImperium is a 2006 novel by English author Robert Harris. It is a fictional biography of Cicero, told through the first-person narrator of his secretary Tiro, beginning with the prosecution of Verres....
, the first novel in a trilogy centred on the life of the great Roman orator
CiceroMarcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. Cicero is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.Cicero is generally perceived to be one of the most versatile minds of ancient Rome...
. The second novel,
LustrumLustrum is a 2009 novel by British author Robert Harris. It is the sequel to Imperium and the middle volume of a trilogy about the life of Cicero....
, was published in October, 2009.
Contemporary political fiction
Harris was an early and enthusiastic backer of Blair and a donor to New Labour funds, but the war in Iraq blunted his enthusiasm. In 2007 British prime minister
Tony BlairAnthony Charles Lynton "Tony" Blair is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...
resigned. Harris, a former
Fleet StreetFleet Street is a street in London, England named after the River Fleet. It was the home of the British press until the 1980s. Even though the last major British news office, Reuters, left in 2005, the street's name continues to be used as a metonym for the British national press.-History and...
political editor, dropped his other work to write
The GhostThe Ghost is a contemporary political thriller by the best-selling English novelist and journalist Robert Harris.In 2007 British prime minister Tony Blair resigned. Harris, a former Fleet Street political editor, dropped his other work to write the book...
. The title refers both to a professional ghost-writer, whose lengthy memorandum forms the novel, and to his immediate predecessor who, as the action opens, has just drowned in gruesome and mysterious circumstances.
The dead man has been ghosting the autobiography of a recently unseated British prime minister called Adam Lang, intended to recall Blair. The fictional counterpart of
Cherie BlairCherie Blair , known professionally as Cherie Booth QC, is an English barrister. She is married to the former British Prime Minister and current Envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East, Tony Blair.-Early life:...
is depicted as a sinister manipulator of her husband. Harris told
The GuardianThe Guardian is a British daily newspaper owned by the Guardian Media Group. Founded in 1821, it is unique among major British newspapers in being owned by a foundation .The Guardian Weekly, which circulates worldwide, provides a compact digest of four newspapers...
before publication: "The day this appears a writ might come through the door. But I would doubt it, knowing him."
Harris said in a US
National Public RadioNational Public Radio is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to 797 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, signed into law...
interview that politicians like Lang and Blair, particularly when they have been in office for a long time, become divorced from everyday reality, read little and end up with a pretty limited overall outlook. When it comes to writing their memoirs, they therefore tend to have all the more need of a ghostwriter.
Harris hinted at a third, far less obvious, allusion hidden in the novel's title, and, more significantly, at a possible motive for having written the book in the first place. Blair, he said, had himself been ghostwriter, in effect, to President
BushGeorge Walker Bush was the 43rd President of the United States from 2001 to 2009 and the 46th Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000....
when giving public reasons for invading
IraqIraq , officially the Republic of Iraq , also known as Mesopotamia, is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert.Iraq shares borders with Jordan to the west, Syria...
: he had argued the case better than had the President himself.
The
New York ObserverThe New York Observer is a weekly newspaper first published in New York City on September 22, 1987, by Arthur L. Carter, a very successful former investment banker with publishing interests...
, headlining its otherwise hostile review
The Blair Snitch Project, commented that the book’s "shock-horror revelation" was "so shocking it simply can’t be true, though if it were it would certainly explain pretty much everything about the recent history of Great Britain."
Roman PolanskiRoman Raymond Polanski is a Polish-French film director, producer, writer, and actor. Polanski began his career in Poland, and later became a critically-acclaimed director of both art house and commercial films....
is set to direct a
film adaptationThe Ghost is an upcoming film adaption of the Robert Harris novel of the same name. The film is directed by Roman Polanski and based on a screenplay written by Harris and Polanski. It stars Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor....
of
The Ghost. Harris co-writes the screenplay with Polanski.
TV appearances
Harris has appeared on the BBC satirical panel game
Have I Got News for YouHave I Got News for You is a British television panel show produced by Hat Trick Productions for the BBC. It is based loosely on the BBC Radio 4 show The News Quiz, and has been running since 1990...
in episode three of the first series in 1990, and in episode four of the second series a year later. In the first he appeared as a last-minute replacement for the politician
Roy HattersleyRoy Sydney George Hattersley, Baron Hattersley is a British Labour politician, author and journalist from Sheffield. He served as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992.-Early life:...
. He made a third appearance on the programme on 12 October 2007, seventeen years, to the day, after his first appearance. Since the gap between his second and third appearance was nearly 16 years, Harris enjoys the distinction of the longest gap between two successive appearances in the show's history.
Personal life
Harris lives in a Berkshire vicarage near Newbury, with his wife Gill Hornby, herself a writer and sister of best-selling novelist
Nick HornbyNick Hornby is an English novelist and essayist. He is best known for the novels High Fidelity, About a Boy and for the football memoir Fever Pitch. His work frequently touches upon music, sports, and the both aimless and obsessive natures of his protagonists.-Life and career:Hornby was born in...
. They have four children.
Fiction
- Fatherland
Fatherland is a bestselling 1992 thriller novel by the English writer and journalist Robert Harris, which doubles as a work of alternate history...
(1992)
- Enigma
Enigma is a novel by Robert Harris, about Tom Jericho, a young mathematician trying to break the Germans' "Enigma" ciphers during World War II. It was adapted to film in 2001...
(1995)
- Archangel (1999)
- Pompeii
Pompeii is a novel by author and journalist Robert Harris published by Random House in 2003. It is a blend of fictional characters with the real-life eruption of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, 79 that overwhelmed Pompeii and its surrounding towns. Pompeii is especially notable for the author's...
(2003)
- The Ghost
The Ghost is a contemporary political thriller by the best-selling English novelist and journalist Robert Harris.In 2007 British prime minister Tony Blair resigned. Harris, a former Fleet Street political editor, dropped his other work to write the book...
(2007)
Cicero trilogy
- Imperium
Imperium is a 2006 novel by English author Robert Harris. It is a fictional biography of Cicero, told through the first-person narrator of his secretary Tiro, beginning with the prosecution of Verres....
(2006)
- Lustrum
Lustrum is a 2009 novel by British author Robert Harris. It is the sequel to Imperium and the middle volume of a trilogy about the life of Cicero....
(2009)
Non-fiction
- A Higher Form of Killing: Secret Story of Gas and Germ Warfare (1982 with Jeremy Paxman
Jeremy Dickson Paxman is a British journalist, author and television presenter. He has worked for the BBC since 1977. He is noted for a forthright and abrasive interviewing style...
)
- Gotcha! The Government, the Media and the Falklands Crisis (1983)
- The Making of Neil Kinnock (1984)
- Selling Hitler: Story of the Hitler Diaries (1986)
- Good and Faithful Servant: Unauthorized Biography of Bernard Ingham
Sir Bernard Ingham is a journalist and former civil servant who is best known as Margaret Thatcher's Chief Press Secretary whilst she was Prime Minister. Today Ingham lectures in Public Relations at Middlesex University in London...
(1990)
External links
- Robert Harris at House of Crime
- Robert Harris at Random House Australia
- transcript of interview with Ramona Koval
Ramona Koval is an Australian broadcaster, writer and journalist.Koval is known for her extended and in-depth interviews with significant writers. She has had a long and varied career on air in Australia on ABC Radio Australian Broadcasting Corporation...
on The Book ShowThe Book Show is a Australian ABC radio program for the discussion of everything relating to the written word. It is broadcast live around Australia on Radio National with a daily weekday morning show which is then replayed nightly and also has a sunday evening show. The show is hosted by Ramona...
ABC Radio National 13 November 2007