Fiction
- Fatherland (1992)
- Enigma (1995)
- Archangel (1998)
- Pompeii (2003)
- Imperium (2006) (Vol 1 of the Cicero Trilogy)
- The Ghost (2007)
- Lustrum (2009) (Vol 2 of the Cicero Trilogy, retitled Conspirata for release in US and Italy)
- The Fear Index (2011)
- An Officer and a Spy (2013)
- Dictator (2015) (Vol 3 of the Cicero Trilogy)
- Conclave (2016)
Non-fiction
- A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Gas and Germ Warfare (with Jeremy Paxman).
- Gotcha! The Government, the Media and the Falklands Crisis.
- The Making of Neil Kinnock.
- Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries.
- Good and Faithful Servant: The Unauthorized Biography of Bernard Ingham.
Robert Dennis Harris (born 7 March 1957) is an English novelist. He is a former journalist and BBC television reporter. Although he began his career in non-fiction, his fame rests upon his works of historical fiction. Beginning with the best-seller Fatherland, Harris focused on events surrounding the Second World War, followed by works set in ancient Rome. His most recent works centre on contemporary history.
Born in Nottingham, 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 Bottesford, and then King Edward VII School, Melton Mowbray, where a hall was named after him. There he wrote plays and edited the school magazine. Harris read English literature at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he was president of the Union and editor of the student newspaper Varsity.
After leaving Cambridge, Harris joined the BBC and worked on news and current affairs programmes such as Panorama and Newsnight. In 1987, at the age of thirty, he became political editor of The Observer. He later wrote regular columns for the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph.
Non-fiction (1982–90)
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 Jeremy Paxman. 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 Diaries scandal, and Good and Faithful Servant (1990), a study of Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary.
Fiction
- Fatherland 1992
Harris’s million-selling alternative-history first novel Fatherland has as its setting a world where Germany has won the Second World War. Publication enabled Harris to become a full-time novelist. HBO made a film based on the novel in 1994.
Harris stated that the proceeds from the book enabled him to buy a house in the country, where he still lives.
- Enigma 1995
His second novel Enigma portrayed the breaking of the German Enigma code during the Second World War at Bletchley Park. It too became a film, with Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet starring and with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard.
- Archangel 1998
Archangel was another international best seller. It follows a British historian in contemporary Russia as he hunts for a secret notebook, believed to be Stalin’s diary. In 2005 the BBC made it into a mini-series starring Daniel Craig.
- Pompeii 2003
In 2003 Harris turned his attention to ancient Rome with his acclaimed Pompeii. The novel is about a Roman aqueduct engineer, working near the city of Pompeii just before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. As the aqueducts begin to malfunction, he investigates and realises the volcano is shifting the ground and damaging the system and is near eruption. Meanwhile, he falls in love with the young daughter of a powerful local businessman who was illicitly dealing with his predecessor to divert municipal water for his own uses, and will do anything to keep that deal going.
- Imperium 2006
He followed this in 2006 with Imperium, the first novel in a trilogy centered on the life of the great Roman orator Cicero.
- The Ghost 2007
Harris was an early and enthusiastic backer of British Prime Minister Tony Blair (a personal acquaintance) and a donor to New Labour, but the war in Iraq blunted his enthusiasm. “We had our ups and downs, but we didn’t really fall out until the invasion of Iraq, which made no sense to me,” Harris has said.
In 2007, after Blair resigned, Harris dropped his other work to write The Ghost. The title refers both to a professional ghostwriter, 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, a thinly veiled version of Blair. The fictional counterpart of Cherie Blair is depicted as a sinister manipulator of her husband. Harris told The Guardian 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 Radio 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 Bush when giving public reasons for invading Iraq: he had argued the case better than had the President himself.
The New York Observer, 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.”
- Lustrum 2009
The second novel in the Cicero trilogy, Lustrum, was published in October 2009. It was released in February 2010 in the US under the alternative title of Conspirata.
- The Fear Index 2011
His novel The Fear Index, focusing on the 2010 Flash Crash, was published by Hutchinson in September 2011. It follows an American expat hedge fund operator living in Geneva who activates a new system of computer algorithms that he names VIXAL-4, which is designed to operate faster than human beings, but which begins to become uncontrollable by its human operators.
- An Officer and a Spy 2013
An Officer and a Spy is the story of French officer Georges Picquart, a historical character, who is promoted in 1895 to run France’s Statistical Section, its secret intelligence division. He gradually realises that Alfred Dreyfus has been unjustly imprisoned for acts of espionage committed by another man who is still free and still spying for the Germans. He risks his career and his life to expose the truth.
- Dictator 2015
Dictator is the long-promised conclusion to Harris’s Cicero trilogy.[7] It was published by Hutchinson on 8 October 2015.[8]
- Conclave 2016
His next novel, Conclave, was published on September 22, 2016. Harris announced on Twitter that the novel is “set over 72 hours in the Vatican” and follows “the election of a fictional Pope.”
Harris lives in a former vicarage near Newbury, Berkshire, with his wife Gill Hornby, herself a writer and sister of best-selling novelist Nick Hornby. They have four children. Harris contributed a short story, “PMQ”, to Hornby’s 2000 collection Speaking with the Angel.
Formerly a donor to the Labour Party, he renounced his support for the party after its appointment of Guardian journalist Seumas Milne as communications director, tweeting: “Council house born. Comprehensive-school educated. Voted Foot, Kinnock. But not for private-school apologists for IRA and Stalin. Sorry”.
REFERENCE:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Harris_(novelist)
