Robert Harris | Signed First Editions

About Robert Harris

Robert Harris grew up on a Nottingham council estate, the son of a printer, in a household where books were not especially abundant but ambition was. He won a place at Cambridge, read English, and graduated into journalism, spending the 1980s as a television reporter for the BBC’s Newsnight and Panorama, then as political editor of the Observer, then as a columnist for the Sunday Times. He knew Westminster and Whitehall from the inside, understood how power actually worked rather than how it presented itself, and that knowledge, forensic and a little cold-eyed, never really left him when he moved into fiction.

His first novel, Fatherland, was published in 1992 and became an immediate international sensation. An alternative history set in a 1964 Berlin where Nazi Germany won the war, it dropped a murder mystery into the heart of a totalitarian state and asked what truth might look like in a world where history had been systematically erased. The first print run sold out almost instantly. The book was adapted for HBO television in 1994 and translated into thirty languages, and it turned Harris into a full-time novelist overnight. He has described the house he subsequently bought in Berkshire, with cheerful self-deprecation, as the one that Hitler built.

Enigma (1995) and Archangel (1998) confirmed that he wasn’t a one-book wonder. Both became bestsellers, both were adapted for screen, Enigma as a 2001 film written by Tom Stoppard and starring Kate Winslet, Archangel as a BBC television film with Daniel Craig. Then came Pompeii (2003), a thriller set against the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, which expanded his range into the ancient world and opened the door to the Cicero Trilogy, three novels, Imperium (2006), Lustrum (2009), and Dictator (2015), that followed the Roman statesman from his early career through the collapse of the Republic. The trilogy is among the most sustained achievements in contemporary historical fiction, rigorous in its research, gripping in its politics, and written with the kind of narrative momentum that makes six hundred pages feel like two hundred.

An Officer and a Spy (2013), a retelling of the Dreyfus Affair from the perspective of the intelligence officer who uncovered the cover-up, is widely considered his finest novel. It won four prizes in a single year, including the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the CWA Gold Dagger, a rare double for a book that straddles both categories. Roman Polanski adapted it as a film in 2019.

Conclave (2016) looked, on the face of it, like a departure, a thriller set entirely within the Vatican during the election of a new pope. In fact it is entirely characteristic Harris, the same fascination with closed institutions and the mechanics of power playing out under pressure. The film adaptation, released in 2024 and directed by Edward Berger with Ralph Fiennes in the lead, won the BAFTA for Best Film and eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. It became one of the most talked-about films of the year, and then, with the death of Pope Francis in April 2025 and the subsequent real conclave, one of the most watched. Harris’s most recent novel, Precipice (2024), returns to the First World War and the political intrigues around Prime Minister Asquith.

He was appointed CBE for services to literature and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His books have sold over ten million copies worldwide and been translated into forty languages.