Richard Harland

Richard Harland is an Australian Fantasy and science fiction writer, academic, and performance artist, living in New South Wales, Australia.

The group travel across Eastern Europe during 1894, and encounter ghosts, blood donating vampires and other comic horror curiosities.

He was born in Huddersfield, United Kingdom and migrated to Australia in 1970.

Throughout his authorship career, he has published 17 full-length works of fiction, three academic books, short stories and poems.

He is best known for his Eddon and Vail science fiction thriller series, the illustrated Wolf Kingdom series for children and three YA steampunk fantasies: Worldshaker, Liberator and Song of the Slums. He has been awarded the Australian Aurealis Award on six occasions for his fiction.

Harland completed undergraduate studies for the English major at Cambridge University, and later graduated with a BA.

After he earned his Bachelor's degree, he planned an ambitious doctoral thesis that would focus on a global theory of poetry language, 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.

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.

Work on his thesis was slow, and he eventually reduced its scope to a MA.

For several years, he eventually moved away from his studies, as he worked as a singer, songwriter and poet 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 by Methuen (UK) as Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism in 1987.

The volume sold well, was received well, and secured him a lecturing position in English at the University of Wollongong.

Other academic books he published are Beyond Superstructuralism: The Syntagmatic Side of Language (Routledge, UK) and Literary Theory from Plato to Barthes (Macmillan, UK).

He taught at (the University of) Wollongong for ten years before resigning to become a full-time fiction writer.

He scored an early success in childhood with a short story that won a prominent United Kingdom competition.

He also wrote and distributed stories while at school, exchanging ongoing installments for sweets and other tokens, when other pupils were reluctant to part with legal tender.

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 once attributed his 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.

However he had published short stories prior to this, some of which (along with poetry) were collected in Testimony (1981).

He was still lecturing at Wollongong when he wrote The Dark Edge, the first instalment in the Eddon and Vail series.

His senior lecturing role was a secure tenured position, much sought after by other professional scholars.

However, with his publisher Pan Macmillan Australia's commission of a sequel to The Dark Edge for the next year, he could not meet the demands of full-time academic life while writing fiction.

It was not until writing the comic horror novel The Vicar of Morbing Vyle (1993) that he managed to conquer this obstacle.

Despite an uncertain future in a small Australian publication market—where books with relatively low volume sales were considered best-sellers and there were few full-time writers—he resigned from his academic role in 1997 to concentrate on his fiction.

He has written full-time since.

For many more years, he remained an Honorary Senior Fellow in English at Wollongong, and also taught summer courses on YA Fantasy fiction there.

Many of Harland's novels contain maps.

He has confessed to a fascination with maps: he states that he sometimes spends hours studying them.

He has also admitted to often viewing his fictional worlds as though seen from an elevated distance, something he feels is a common feature among Fantasy writers.

From the 1999 release of Hidden from View, the final volume to his Eddon and Vail series, every novel has been written either for young adults or children, with the exception of The Black Crusade (2004).

Some of his novels have also been adapted into audiobooks.

The first volume, The Vicar of Morbing Vyle, was Harland's first published novel.

When Karl Evans Publishing started distributing the book, he approached individual booksellers in Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney to promote it.

Although out of print, it has since attained a cult status, something he claims was his original hope and dream when marketing the book.

The Black Crusade, a prequel to The Vicar of Morbing Vyle, was released 11 years later in 2004.

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" because they've imprisoned the object of his undying love, an Australian singer Volusia, in a mobile iron box.