Photo: Anita Sivakumaran
Harry Whitehead
Agent: Isobel Dixon
Assistant: Finlay Charlesworth
Biography: Harry Whitehead is a novelist and Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, where he is Co-Director of the Centre for New Writing. He has been a Wingate Scholar and was 2016-7 Eccles Centre Fellow in North American Studies at the British Library.
His debut novel, THE CANNIBAL SPIRIT (Penguin Canada) is a work of literary historical fiction set among the First Peoples of Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. The product of some fifteen years of historical and ethnographic research, it has been described as ‘powerful, brave, ambitious’ (The Globe and Mail), ‘a thriller with a Joseph Conradian plot’ (The Walrus), ‘a unique work, compelling, complex, thought-provoking and impressive’ (Quill and Quire).
Before he was published he spent several years in the Far East, then returned to the UK to complete a degree in Anthropology at Sussex and then an MSc in medical anthropology at University College London. He worked for many years in the film business as an assistant director, location scout and manager, and has recently advised as a story consultant. On moving into fiction and academia, he gained an MA in creative writing at Birkbeck and then a PhD at Lancaster University.
He is completing his second novel, THE WHITE ROAD, a literary thriller set in the High Arctic.
THE CANNIBAL SPIRIT
Literary Fiction, 306 pages
Penguin Canada - September 2011
The year is 1900. George Hunt has a white father and a native mother. He is also an assistant to the famous anthropologists Franz Boas and a collector of native artefacts for the white man’s museums. Hunt inhabits both worlds but can find no peace in either. Based on a true story.