Carey Harrison

Prize-winning novelist and playwright Carey Harrison was born in London, England. His parents, stage and screen actors Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, brought him to Los Angeles when he was a year old, and then to New York when he was 5. He completed his education in the UK: successively at Sunningdale School, at Harrow School, and at Cambridge University, where he received an Honours Degree and a Masters Degree in English. He has taught at many universities, including at Essex University in the UK, and in the US at the Florida Institute of Technology, at the University of California at San Diego, at the University of Texas at Austin, where he succeeded Nobel-prize-winning novelist John Coetzee, and at Cornell. For the past 20 years he has been Professor of English at the City University of New York. He lives in Woodstock, New York, with his wife, the artist Claire Lambe.

Harrison's output as a dramatist includes more than 40 plays for the stage, 50 for radio, and over a hundred plays for television including 17 hours of Masterpiece Theater seen in the US, His many award-winning radio dramas for the BBC include A Cook's Guide to Communism, the WorldPlay award-winner in 2005. His radio plays have been widely recorded internationally, with 20 of his plays broadcast in Germany alone; they have been translated into a dozen languages and frequently re-broadcast.

He has published ten novels, including Richard's Feet, longlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the UK Society of Authors' Encore Award. His first novel was acclaimed as "a work of near-demonic beauty, antic imagination, and universal resonance," in the San Francisco Chronicle, and his subsequent books have been compared to the novels of Lawrence Durrell, Anthony Burgess, Ford Madox Ford and (by M.H. Abrams) to the novels of Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov. They have been termed "fascinating, a superb analysis" in the New York Times, "essential reading" in the Financial Times, and "magnificent" and "superb" in London's Times and Sunday Times. The Dublin Evening News called him "one of the most accomplished writers of our time."

Four of his novels form a quartet entitled The Heart Beneath, published together in 2016. A separate group of his novels form a quintet, of which four are in print, entitled the Justice Quintet. The second of these, Who Was That Lady? inspired Harrison's nomination to a year's Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin from September 2016 to July 2017. The author is also a Member of the Board of the Einstein Forum, a multi-disciplinary think-tank based in Potsdam, Germany.

His further output includes published translations from French, Italian, German and Spanish authors, and performed translations from the works of Pirandello, Goldoni, Feydeau and the late Gert Hofmann; most recently he published 20 Poems from the Arabic of Firas Sulaiman, in Banipal, the UK magazine of contemporary Arabic writing. As a columnist and book reviewer for numerous newspapers and journals including The Vocabula Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Sunday Times and The London Review of Books, he has received two nominations (2005 and 2007) for the Pushcart Prize for Journalism.

In March 2013 his opera based on Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, with music by Nolan Gasser, and commissioned by the San Francisco Opera House, premiered to critical acclaim and sold-out houses in San Francisco, and has been scheduled for more opera houses around the country.

For more about Carey Harrison please visit his website, carey-harrison.com