Carey Harrison - Life

Life

Harrison was born in London to actors Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, and raised in Los Angeles and New York, where he attended the Lycée Français. Subsequently, in Britain, he attended Sunningdale School, Harrow School, and Jesus College, Cambridge.

His first play, Dante Kaputt, was staged at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, in 1966. Subsequent plays were premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh and the Stables Theatre Club in Manchester, where Harrison was Resident Playwright during 1969 and '70. His drama output for radio and television includes numerous award-winning plays, among them the WorldPlay award-winner in 2005 for the best play from an English-language broadcaster, worldwide. This play, Hitler in Therapy, was Harrison's 100th drama to be recorded in a UK studio. A more recent play, A Cook's Tour of Communism, was broadcast by the BBC World Service in 2008. His most recent radio drama, Breakfast With Stalin, was premiered in 2010 by Westdeutscher Rundfunk Koeln in Germany, where 16 of Harrison's plays have been broadcast in translation. During 2009, a new stage play, Scenes From a Misunderstanding, a comedy about the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, was premiered at the Jewish Theatre Festival in Manhattan, and subsequently re-mounted at the Byrdcliffe Theater in Woodstock, NY, along with Bad Boy, a companion piece written for the New York cast. A subsequent play, Magus, was staged by The Woodstock Players in June 2010, and another, Midget In A Catsuit Reciting Spinoza, in June 2011. His latest play, Hedgerow Specimen, was staged by The Woodstock Players in June 2012. Two new plays for the Woodstock Players, I Won't Bite You: an Interview with the Notorious Monster, Dorothea Farber, and Rex & Rex, are scheduled to play in repertoire in June and July 2013. 17 hours of Harrison's work have been seen on Masterpiece Theatre, including the miniseries Freud.

He is the author of 40 stage plays and 16 novels, most notably Richard's Feet, published by Holt in the U.S. and by Heinemann in Britain, winner of the Encore Award from the UK Society of Authors. Harrison has received numerous grants from the UK Arts Council, and his prizes include Sony Radio Academy Awards, the Giles Cooper Award, the Prix Marulic, the UK Writers' Guild Award for Best Play, the Prix Italia Silver Award and the Best Play award from the Berlin Akademie der Kuenste, as well as two nominations (2005 and 2007) for the Pushcart Prize for Journalism. His work has been translated into thirteen languages. His output includes published translations from French, Italian, German and Spanish authors, and performed translations from the works of Pirandello, Goldoni, Feydeau and the late Gert Hofmann; most recently he published 20 Poems from the Arabic of Firas Sulaiman, in Banipal, the UK magazine of contemporary Arabic writing. Since 2005 he has contributed a monthly essay on linguistic trends in The Vocabula Review, and since November 2011, a monthly column on fiction-writing in Roll magazine, online. Harrison's essays have appeared in magazines as diverse as New Politics: a journal of socialist thought, and Chronicles: a paleoconservative magazine of American culture. He has also been a book reviewer for numerous newspapers and journals including the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Sunday Times and the London Review of Books.

He is currently working on a commission from the San Francisco Opera House, to write the libretto for a new opera based on Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, to music by Nolan Gasser, due to premiere in March 2013.

Harrison lives in upstate New York with his wife, artist Claire Lambe, and youngest daughter, and is Professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He is currently Artistic Director of The Woodstock Players Theater Company. Under the name Ustaz Omar Bey he is Bishop of Woodstock in the Moorish Orthodox Church of America.