Richard Harland facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Richard Harland
Born	Huddersfield, United Kingdom
Nationality	Australian
Education	BA, English Literature, PhD. Literary Theory
Occupation	Novelist
Spouse(s)	Aileen

Richard Harland is an Australian writer who creates amazing fantasy and science fiction stories. He is also a former university teacher and a performance artist. He was born in Huddersfield, United Kingdom, and moved to Australia in 1970. Richard Harland has written 17 novels, three academic books, and many short stories and poems.

He is famous for his exciting Eddon and Vail science fiction series. He also wrote the illustrated Wolf Kingdom series for younger readers. For teens, he created three YA steampunk fantasy books: Worldshaker, Liberator, and Song of the Slums. Richard Harland has won the Australian Aurealis Award six times for his fiction.

Richard Harland's Life and Studies

Richard Harland studied English at Cambridge University and earned a BA degree. After that, he wanted to write a big research paper about poetry language. He looked for universities around the world to help him with his research.

He finally got an offer from the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia. He moved to Australia in 1970 to take this chance. At first, he only planned to stay until he finished his PhD. But after a few months, he decided to live in Australia permanently.

His research for his PhD was slow. He later decided to make it a MA degree instead. For several years, he stopped his studies and worked as a singer, songwriter, and poet in Sydney. During this time, he published poems and short stories in different literary magazines. He went back to university life in the 1980s. He started teaching at the University of New South Wales. He also continued working on his PhD.

His PhD was published as a book called Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism in 1987. The book sold well and was well-received. This helped him get a teaching job in English at the University of Wollongong. He also published other academic books like Beyond Superstructuralism and Literary Theory from Plato to Barthes. He taught at the University of Wollongong for ten years. Then, he left to become a full-time fiction writer.

Becoming a Fiction Writer

Richard Harland had an early success as a child. He won a big competition in the United Kingdom with a short story. At school, he also wrote and shared stories with other students. He would trade his stories for sweets and other small items.

He is best known for his series of novels. However, he started writing novels quite late in his life. He wanted to write long stories since he was a child. But he often had writer's block, which stopped him from making much progress on novels for about 25 years. He once said that his writer's block was partly because he felt he had to write serious literary novels. He preferred to write what he truly enjoyed.

He finally overcame this problem when he wrote the comic horror novel The Vicar of Morbing Vyle in 1993. Before this, he had published short stories. Some of these, along with his poetry, were collected in a book called Testimony in 1981.

He was still teaching at Wollongong when he wrote The Dark Edge. This was the first book in his Eddon and Vail series. His teaching job was very secure and sought after by other scholars. But his publisher, Pan Macmillan Australia, asked him to write a sequel to The Dark Edge for the next year. He realized he could not teach full-time and write fiction at the same time.

The Australian book market was small, and few writers could make a living from writing full-time. Despite this uncertain future, he left his academic job in 1997 to focus on his fiction. He has been writing full-time ever since. For many years, he remained an Honorary Senior Fellow in English at Wollongong. He also taught summer classes there on YA fantasy fiction.

Richard Harland's Novels

Many of Richard Harland's novels include maps. He has said he loves maps and sometimes spends hours studying them. He also admitted that he often sees his fictional worlds from high above. He feels this is common among fantasy writers.

Since 1999, when Hidden from View (the last Eddon and Vail book) came out, almost all his novels have been for young adults or children. The only exception is The Black Crusade (2004). Some of his novels have also been made into audiobooks.

The Vicar Series

The Vicar of Morbing Vyle was Richard Harland's first published novel. When Karl Evans Publishing started selling the book, he visited bookstores in Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney to promote it. Even though it is now out of print, it has become a cult classic. He says this was his original hope when he marketed the book.

The Black Crusade, which is a story that happens before The Vicar of Morbing Vyle, came out 11 years later in 2004. It tells the story of Basil Smorta, a bank clerk who speaks many languages. He is forced to join a group of "fundamental Darwinists" because they have captured the singer he loves, Volusia. The group travels across Eastern Europe in 1894. They meet ghosts, vampires who give blood, and other funny horror characters. This novel shows where the 'vyle' principle comes from.

The novel was published by Chimaera Publications. This company also produces Aurealis, a magazine about Australian speculative fiction. It also started the Aurealis Awards. The Black Crusade won an Aurealis Award for "Best Horror Novel" and "Golden Aurealis Best Novel."

The Eddon and Vail Series

This series has three science fiction novels. They mix detective mystery with supernatural elements. Inspector Eddon Brac is a male detective who likes traditional ways. His partner is Vail ev Vessintor, a goth woman from a noble family. She is an expert in psychic sciences. Each book shows the tension between them as they solve strange and surprising murder mysteries.

The series is set when the planet Terra has spread its influence across the universe. But this power is now threatened by the Anti-Human, a mysterious danger. The Anti-Human moves steadily from the edge of the universe towards the center, destroying Terran colonies as it goes.

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

The Heaven and Earth Trilogy

This trilogy for young adults is set in Australia 1000 years in the future. It is about a war between heaven and Earth. Each book includes information about angels.

To prepare for writing the trilogy, Richard Harland researched angels and cosmology a lot. He looked at both common and unusual sources about angels in Christian, Islamic, and Judaic stories. He especially wanted to show angels as amazing, beautiful, and spiritual beings. He wanted angels to have personalities that readers could understand, but also to be very different from sweet, 'Disney-fied' images. The first book he read about angels was A Dictionary of Angels by Gustav Davidson. He went back to this book many times for ideas for all the books in the trilogy. He also said that the Ghent Altarpiece painting by Jan van Eyck greatly helped him imagine heaven.

The Wolf Kingdom Series

This series has four illustrated fantasy books. They are for older pre-teens. The first book is Escape! and the last is The Heavy Crown. All were published in 2008. Richard Harland wrote the stories, and Laura Peterson drew the pictures for each chapter. Each story can be read on its own, but they also connect to form a bigger story.

The books were launched with the Children's Book Council of Australia.

In these stories, talking, two-legged wolves have taken over and enslaved humans. Only a group called the "Free Folk" resists them. They hide underground and plan to free themselves. The big mystery in the series is how these creatures changed from animals to powerful rulers of humans. The books focus on a brother and sister whose parents are taken by the wolves. They join the "Free Folk" and become very important to the rebellion. Richard Harland has always been interested in wolves. He says this started when he was a child in the UK. He would pass a scary wood called 'Wolves Wood' every day on his school bus, which made a big impression on him.

The series won the 2008 Aurealis Award for "best children's illustrated work/picture book." The judges praised both Richard Harland and his illustrator, Laura Peterson. They said, "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."

Other Children's Books

• Walter Wants to Be a Werewolf (2003)

This book is part of the Aussie Chomps series for teenagers. Walter is a young member of a family of werewolves. But he struggles to become a true werewolf when the full moon rises. So, he visits a doctor hoping to find a cure for his problem.

• Sassycat: The Night of the Dead (2005)

Published by Scholastic, this novel is mostly told by Sassycat, a very smart cat. She moves to a new home with her owner, Rebecca. Sassycat doesn't think much of her new animal neighbors. But she has to work with them to defeat the ghosts invading their area from a nearby cemetery.

Worldshaker, Liberator, Song of the Slums

Richard Harland's series of YA steampunk novels started with Worldshaker. This book was partly inspired by the works of Mervyn Peake and Charles Dickens. It came out in May 2009 in Australia, and then in the United States, UK, France, Germany, and Brazil. The main idea for this book came from a dream he had, which is now one of the scenes in the book.

The main character is Col. He lives in the fancy upper parts of a huge city-ship that is as big as a mountain. He has been chosen to be the next commander of the ship. But he starts to question his world when a girl who escaped from the lower decks asks for his help. She shows him the poverty and unfairness below the elite world where he grew up. The novel was sold to the American publisher Simon & Schuster for a large amount of money.

The story is similar to the plot of the 1927 film Metropolis. Both stories feature a young man who is set to inherit power in an unfair society with different classes. A young woman from the working class teams up with him to overthrow the cruel system.

Richard Harland started developing ideas for Worldshaker in the mid-1990s. It took him five years to write the novel, and he rewrote it completely three times. It was first called Leviathan, then Juggernaught, before finally being published as Worldshaker. The sequel, Liberator, was published worldwide by the same publishers.

For his third steampunk novel, Richard Harland set the story earlier in the same world. It takes place after the Napoleonic invasion of England (through a tunnel that was planned but never built in real history). But it is before the big city-ships were launched. The main character is Astor. She starts from a rich and privileged background but ends up in the very polluted, foggy slums of 'London Town'. There, she joins a gang and discovers she is good at playing a new kind of rhythmic music on the drums. This music is basically rock 'n roll, but it happens a century before Elvis and Bill Haley. The novel tells the story of how 'gang music' becomes popular and how Astor's band rises to fame. It also has a side story about a group of powerful people trying to take control. The book also explores Astor's relationship with the mysterious Verrol.

The Ferren Trilogy

Ferren and the Angel, a dystopian YA novel, was published by IFWG Publishing in 2023. It is the first book in the Ferren trilogy and is a rewritten version of a novel from the Heaven and Earth trilogy.

The story is set far in the future. Only scattered ruins are left from today's civilization. Artificially created beings called "Humen" fight an endless war against Heaven. The descendants of original humans now live a simple life, surviving without much knowledge in isolated tribes.

Fifteen-year-old Ferren belongs to a tribe called "the People." Like other tribes, the People see themselves as allies of the Humen, but they also fear them. The black-clad Selectors are especially terrifying. They choose one tribal member each year for "military service."

Ferren’s life changes when he sees a "Celestial" shot down and crashing to Earth. He investigates and finds the angel Miriael, who is barely conscious and about to die. Feeling sorry for his tribe’s supposed enemy, he feeds her human food. This "corrupts" her spiritual purity, but it also allows her to live in Earth's air.

From Miriael, Ferren learns truths about his world. Then, after being temporarily sent away by the People, he goes into the Humen Camp. This is a military and industrial complex. There, he learns the truth about "military service." In the end, his connection with Miriael becomes very important. It helps protect his tribe through the huge and violent battle between Earth and Heaven.

Richard Harland's Shorter Stories

Richard Harland has published over 20 short stories and novellas. These have appeared in magazines and collections in the United States, Australia, Canada, and France. His work has been included in 'best of' collections. These include Dreaming Again, Dreaming in the Dark, and Ghosts by Gaslight, put together by American editor Jack Dann. Other collections are The Best Horror of the Year (edited by Ellen Datlow, US), Year's Best Fantasy 9 (edited by Hartwell and Cramer, US), and Year's Best Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy 4 (edited by Congreve and Marquardt). His stories have also been in The Year's Best Australian Fantasy & Horror 2011 (edited by Grzyb and Helene), and in France, Ténebres 2007 (edited by Benoit Domis). Several of his stories have received special mentions in the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror collections, edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling. His shorter fiction has been nominated for and won Australian speculative fiction awards.