M John Harrison

Writers as diverse as Olivia Laing, Robert MacFarlane, Ursula Le Guin and Neil Gaiman have all identified M John Harrison as one of most talented and original of his generation of British writers. Coming up at an oblique angle to his contemporaries, he wrote some of the most famous science fiction and fantasy novels of the 1970s and 80s in the Viriconium sequence and The Centauri Device. His Empty Space trilogy, which marked a return to science fiction, won both the Arthur C Clarke and the James Tiptree Jnr awards. 

Harrison won the 2020 Goldsmith's Prize with The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, which was also chosen as a New Statesman Book of the Year. His most recent book — Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir — was published by Serpent's Tail in 2023 and chosen as a TLS Book of the Year.