Robert Harris

Robert Harris is a British novelist and journalist born in 1957 in Nottingham. After studying English at Cambridge, he worked as a political journalist for the BBC and newspapers before becoming a full-time novelist with the publication of Fatherland (1992), an alternative history set in a Nazi-ruled Europe. Subsequent novels include Archangel (1998), Pompeii (2003), Imperium (2006), The Ghost (2007, adapted by Roman Polanski), The Fear Index (2011), and the Cicero trilogy. An Officer and a Spy (2013), a meticulous novelisation of the Dreyfus Affair, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2014 and received wide critical acclaim. Harris is notable for combining rigorous research with gripping narrative, making serious historical subjects accessible to a wide readership. Act of Oblivion (2022), about the hunt for the regicides who signed Charles I's death warrant, was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize in 2023. Harris is one of Britain's most commercially successful literary novelists. He was formerly a close ally of Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair and has written non-fiction about politics including Selling Hitler (1986) and The Making of Neil Kinnock (1984).