M. John Harrison

Michael John Harrison, born 26 July 1945 in Rugby, Warwickshire, and publishing as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories from 1971 to 1984, the novel Climbers of 1989 and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space. He is widely considered one of the major stylists of modern fantasy and science fiction and a genre contrarian. From 1968 to 1975 he was literary editor of the New Wave science fiction magazine New Worlds, where he worked with Michael Moorcock and wrote criticism, often under the pseudonym Joyce Churchill, and he was important to the New Wave style. Robert Macfarlane has said that for Harrison the question of genre is an irrelevance, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2025.