Richard Harland

Harland's most recent series of novels commenced with Worldshaker, a young adult steampunk novel partly inspired by the work of Charles Dickens, released in May 2009 in Australia. The main inspiration for this book was the dream he had which is now one of the scenes in the book. The principal character is Col, who lives in the privileged upper sections of a mountain-sized city-ship. He has been selected to become the next commander of the craft, but is forced to question his world when a girl who has escaped from the lower decks, seeks his help and reveals to him the poverty and exploitation below the elite world of his upbringing. The novel sold to US publisher Simon & Schuster for a substantial advance.

The Wolf Kingdom Series comprises four illustrated fantasy books, aimed at older pre-adolescents, commencing with Escape! and completed by The Heavy Crown, all published in 2008. Harland wrote the story, and Laura Peterson provided illustrations which head each chapter and are mostly full page. Each tale functions as a self-contained narrative, but the series also interlinks as a larger story arc.

The series won the 2008 Aurealis Award for the "best children's illustrated work/picture book" category. In awarding the series an Aurealis the judges, acknowledging the dual work of Harland and his illustrator partner, Laura Peterson, commented: "The illustrations help to bring alive aspects of the story – muscular pictures for a muscular tale. Laura Peterson has shown attention to detail in all the artwork pertaining to the wolves and helps to support the atmosphere of peril that Richard Harland has created."

Richard Harland has published nearly 20 short stories and novellas. His work has been included in anthologies such as Encounters, Outcast, and the 2008 published Dreaming Again, the second anthology of Australian speculative fiction compiled by prolific editor and anthologist, Jack Dann. He has also published shorter works in magazines in Australia and the United States. Several of his stories have received honourable mentions in the prominent Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies, edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling. His shorter fiction has been both nominated for and won Australian speculative fiction awards.

He was guest judge on the 2007 Australian Shadows award.

It was a finalist for the 2005 Aurealis Award for best children's (8–12 years) long fiction.

It was followed in 2004 by The Black Crusade, a prequel to The Vicar of Morbing Vyle. It describes the journey of the hapless Basil Smorta, a multi lingual bank clerk, who is forced into the company of a group of "fundamental Darwinists" by their imprisonment of the object of his undying love, Australian singer, Volusia, in a mobile iron box. The group travel across Eastern Europe during 1894, and encounter ghosts, blood donating vampires and other comic horror curiosities. The novel, which shows the origin of the 'vyle' Marquis of Morbol Villica from the first volume in the series, plays with the notion of the tale's reliability as a factual narrative, including fictional footnotes, apparently inserted by the publisher, to show their disdain and disagreement with Basil's actions and their unheroic qualities.

The novel was published by Chimaera Publications, which also produces Aurealis, a magazine which publishes and promotes Australian speculative fiction, and originated the Aurealis Awards (although these awards have been administered entirely independently from Chimaera by another organisation since 2004). The novel won an Aurealis Award in 2004 in both the "Best Horror Novel" and the overarching "Golden Aurealis Best Novel" categories.

Following the 1999 publication of Hidden from View, the final volume in his Eddon and Vail series, all of his novels have been written either for young adults or children, with the exception of The Black Crusade (2004). Some of his novels have also been published as audio books.

He was still lecturing at the University of Wollongong when he wrote The Dark Edge, the first novel of his "Eddon and Vail" science fiction thriller series. His senior lecturing role was a secure tenured position, much sought after by professional scholars, however, with a sequel to The Dark Edge having been commissioned by his publisher, Pan Macmillan Australia, set to appear the following year, he felt unable to juggle the demands of full-time academic life with fiction writing. Despite an uncertain future in a small Australian publication market, where relatively low volume sales are considered a best-seller and there are few full-time writers, he resigned his position in 1997 to concentrate on his fiction. He has been a full-time writer ever since. He remains an Honorary Senior Fellow in English at the University of Wollongong. He has also taught summer courses at the university, most recently on children's and young adult fantasy literature.

The first volume, The Dark Edge was a finalist for the 1997 Aurealis Award in both the Horror Novel and Science Fiction Novel categories and the third, Hidden from View, was nominated for the 1999 Ditmar Award in the Best Novel category.

He is best known for several series of novels, but commenced his novel writing career relatively late in life. He had been eager to write full length tales from late childhood but suffered from writer's block, which prevented him making significant headway with novel projects (and also many short stories) for much of the next 25 years. He was able to produce academic books during this period, however, and he attributes the writer's block partly to his belief that he had to write serious literary novels rather than what he found most enjoyable to work on. It was not until writing the comic horror novel The Vicar of Morbing Vyle (1993) that he managed to conquer this obstacle. However he had published short stories prior to this, some of which were collected in Testimony (1981), which also included his poetry.

Harland began developing the ideas for Worldshaker in the mid 1990s and took five years to write the novel, passing through 3 complete rewrites. It was first entitled Leviathan, later Juggernaught before finally being published as Worldshaker. The sequel to Worldshaker has been published as Liberator.

Work on his thesis was slow, and he eventually reduced its scope to an MA, before moving away from his studies for several years, while he worked as a singer, songwriter and poet in and around Sydney. He published poetry and short stories during this period in a number of literary magazines. He returned to academic life in the 1980s through a tutoring position at the University of New South Wales and continued work on his doctoral thesis, which was published as Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism in 1987. The volume sold well, was well received, and secured him a lecturing position in English at the University of Wollongong, where he remained for ten years. During his academic career he published full-length works and a number of articles on literary theory.

Richard Harland completed undergraduate studies at Cambridge University, graduating with a BA and majoring in English. After graduation, he planned an ambitious doctoral thesis, focusing on a global theory of the language of poetry and approached numerous universities around the globe seeking funding for his research. Support was unforthcoming until an offer from the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, consequently he migrated to Australia in 1970 to take advantage of this opportunity. He originally only intended to remain in the country until his PhD was completed, but after some months decided to settle permanently.

Richard Harland (born 15 January 1947 in Yorkshire) is an English fantasy and science fiction writer, living in New South Wales, Australia. He was born in 1947 in Huddersfield, United Kingdom and migrated to Australia in 1970. He has been an academic, performance artist and writer, publishing 15 full-length works of fiction, three academic books, short stories and poems.