Craig Harrison (born 1942 in Leeds, Yorkshire) is a retired lecturer, author, playwright, and scriptwriter probably best known for novel The Quiet Earth. Harrison's output has ranged widely, from science fiction to junior fiction, to comedies parodying academia. All of his books were published first in his adopted home of New Zealand.
The end-of-the-world tale The Quiet Earth was shortlisted for New Zealand Book of the Year in 1982. It also inspired the acclaimed 1985 film of the same name, directed by Geoff Murphy, which won some rave reviews in the United States. Harrison also wrote 1991's Grievous Bodily, a comical novel in which two inept university lecturers stumble upon a briefcase containing large quantities of stolen cash. Many chases and some exploding food items follow.
Harrison's television work includes writing the 1978 culture-clash comedy Joe and Koro. The show's basic concept - the friendship between an English-born schoolteacher and a Māori - has a convoluted history, the main characters having appeared in Harrison's award-winning radio play Ground Level, two different iterations of a stageplay, and a novel published in the early 1980s.
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“Is that the Craig Jurgesen that Teddy Roosevelt gave you?... And you used it at San Juan Hill defending liberty. Now you want to destroy it.”
—Laurence Stallings (1894–1968)
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—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)