Robert Harris (novelist)
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Robert Dennis Harris (born March 7, 1957 in Nottingham) was an English TV reporter and journalist and is currently a novelist.
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[edit] Background
Of humble origins, his early years were spent in a small, rented house on a Nottingham council estate. His bent to be a writer showed itself at a young age, following visits to the local print works where his father was employed. He attended King Edward VII College, Melton Mowbray, where there is now a hall named after him. There he wrote plays and edited the school magazine. As an undergraduate student, he read English Literature at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he was both President of the Cambridge Union and editor of the student newspaper Varsity.
Robert Harris lives in a Berkshire vicarage, with his wife Gill Hornby, [also a writer] and their four children. His books are now translated into thirty languages.
[edit] Career
After graduating he worked for the BBC on news and current affairs programs such as Panorama and Newsnight. In 1987, at the age of thirty, he became political editor of The Observer newspaper.
In the course of his journalistic career he also wrote columns for The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph.
[edit] Non-fiction period (1982-1990)
His real ambition however was to be an author, rather than a journalist. In 1982 his first book appeared, a factual work on chemical and biological warfare called A Higher Form Of Killing, which he wrote in collaboration with Jeremy Paxman. Other non-fiction works followed, Gotcha, the Media, the Government and the Falkands Crisis (1983), The Making of Neil Kinnock (1984), Selling Hitler (1986) (about the Hitler Diaries) and Good and Faithful Servant (1990) (about Bernard Ingham, press secretary to Margaret Thatcher).
[edit] Mainstream works and public acclaim (1992-1999)
It was after the publication of his million selling first novel, Fatherland, in 1992 that Harris became a full time author. A film deal soon followed, as it did for his second novel Enigma (1995) about the breaking of the German Enigma code, which was turned into a film starring Kate Winslet with screenplay by Tom Stoppard. Archangel (1998) was also an international bestseller and was adapted as a BBC mini-series in 2005.
[edit] Historical fiction (2003-present)
In 2003, Harris turned his attention towards Ancient Rome with his acclaimed Pompeii which was an international best seller. His latest work is a beginning of a trilogy, called Imperium (2006), about the life of Rome’s great orator, Cicero. In February 2007 it was announced that Roman Polanski was set to direct the film of "Pompeii".
[edit] TV work
Robert Harris has appeared on the BBC panel game Have I Got News For You, having been called up as a last minute replacement for no-shower Roy Hattersley.
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Historical fiction
- Pompeii (2003) ISBN 0-09-177925-1
[edit] Cicero trilogy
- Imperium (2006) ISBN 0-09-180095-1, Published in hardback in the UK in September 2006 and in paperback in March 2007.
- Book 2 (2007)
[edit] Thrillers
- Fatherland (1992) ISBN 0-06-100662-9 (adapted as an HBO TV movie in 1994 [1])
- Enigma (1995) ISBN 0-09-999200-0 (adapted as a movie in 2001 [2])
- Archangel (1999) ISBN 0-515-12748-5 (adapted as a BBC mini-series in 2005 [3])
[edit] Non-fiction
- Good and Faithful Servant
- Selling Hitler, which tells the story of the fraudulent Hitler Diaries, made into a a TV miniseries starring Jonathan Pryce and Alexei Sayle
- The Making of Neil Kinnock
- Gotcha! The Government, the Media and the Falklands Crisis
- A Higher Form of Killing (with Jeremy Paxman)
