Wish I Was Here: ‘The best writer you’ve never heard of’ – Sunday

‘Wish I Was Here is a masterpiece’ Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk

‘It will surprise you, sometimes astound you, and leave you profoundly changed’ Jonathan Coe, author of The Rotters’ Club

M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, magical and literary realism. Every book is subversive of genre and united by restless intelligence, experimentation and rebelliousness of spirit.

This is his first memoir, an ‘anti-memoir’, written in his mid-seventies with aphoristic daring and trademark originality and style, fresh after winning the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020. Many of our most prominent younger writers now recognise him as the most significant British writer of his generation. He is ‘brilliantly unsettling’ (Olivia Laing), ‘magnificent’ (Neil Gaiman), ‘one of the best writers of fiction currently at work in English’ (Robert Macfarlane).

M. John Harrison, a genre-defying author and literary critic, has been hailed by writers including Olivia Laing, Robert MacFarlane and Neil Gaiman as one of the most brilliant prose stylists alive today.