British · b. 1945
M. John Harrison is an English novelist, short story writer, and critic, working since the mid-1960s across science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction while resisting easy placement in any of them. He came up through the British New Wave alongside New Worlds magazine, and his Viriconium sequence (1971-1984) dismantled the conventions of secondary-world fantasy from the inside, treating its own setting as unstable and unreliable. Climbers (1989), a novel about rock climbing and class in the north of England, won the Boardman Tasker Prize. His Kefahuchi Tract trilogy - Light (2002), Nova Swing (2006), and Empty Space (2012) - brought the same suspicion of tidy resolution to space opera, winning the Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick Awards along the way. Widely cited by later genre writers as a formative influence for his prose style and refusal of comforting closure, Harrison occupies an unusual position: a writers writer whose reputation rests as much on what his fiction withholds as on what it delivers.