His first play, Dante Kaputt, was staged at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, in 1966.[2] Subsequent plays were premiered at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and the Stables Theatre Club in Manchester, where Harrison was Resident Playwright from 1969 to 1970. His drama output for radio and television includes numerous award-winning plays,[3] among them are I Never Killed My German (which won a Giles Cooper Award in 1979), Hitler in Therapy and A Cook's Tour of Communism. His recent work,A Cook's Tour of Communism, was broadcast by the BBC World Service in 2008. His most recent radio drama, Breakfast With Stalin, was premiered in 2010 by Westdeutscher Rundfunk Koeln in Germany, where 16 of Harrison's plays have been broadcast in translation.[citation needed]
In 2009, a new stage play, Scenes From a Misunderstanding, a comedy about the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, was premiered at the Jewish Theatre Festival in Manhattan, and subsequently re-mounted at the Byrdcliffe Theater in Woodstock, New York, along with Bad Boy, a companion piece written for the New York cast. A subsequent play, Magus, was staged by The Woodstock Players in June 2010, and another, Midget in a Catsuit Reciting Spinoza, in June 2011. His next play, Hedgerow Specimen, was staged by The Woodstock Players in June 2012. Three new plays for the Woodstock Players, I Won't Bite You: an Interview with the Notorious Monster, Dorothea Farber, and Rex & Rex, were premiered in repertoire in June and July 2013. 17 hours of Harrison's work have been seen on Masterpiece Theatre, including the miniseries Freud.[4]
He is the author of 40 stage plays and 16 novels, most notably Richard's Feet, published by Henry Holt and Company in the US and by Heinemann in Britain,[5] winner of the Encore Award from the UK Society of Authors. Harrison's most recent novels, Justice, and Who Was That Lady? have been acclaimed by readers, and both reached no.1 on the Amazon Contemporary Fiction downloads list.[citation needed]
His latest, Dog's Mercury, was published on 18 September 2015. Harrison has received numerous grants from the UK Arts Council, and his prizes include Sony Radio Academy Awards, the Giles Cooper Award, the Prix Marulic, the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for Best Play, the Prix Italia Silver Award and the Best Play award from the Berlin Akademie der Kuenste, as well as two nominations (2005 and 2007) for the Pushcart Prize for Journalism. His work has been translated into thirteen languages. His output includes published translations from French, Italian, German and Spanish authors, and performed translations from the works of Pirandello, Goldoni, Feydeau, and Gert Hofmann.[citation needed]
Harrison was one of the London Recruits, a group of young people recruited by the African National Congress (ANC) in the 1960s and 1970s to smuggle ANC and SACP literature into South Africa after the ANC had been decimated by the Rivonia trials which ran from 9 October 1963 to 12 June 1964.[7][8]
Personal life
Harrison is the half-brother of actor and singer Noel Harrison. His first wife was Mary Chamberlain.[7] Harrison now lives in upstate New York with his wife, the artist Claire Lamb;[9] he has four children, Rosie (Laurence), Chiara, Faith, and Sam, and one stepdaughter, Zoe Lambe. He is a Professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
