Nick Harkaway

Nick Harkaway is the author of nine novels including The Gone-Away World, Gnomon and Titanium Noir. In 2024 he published the new (and Sunday Times bestselling) George Smiley book Karla's Choice. His second outing in the world of John le Carré's Circus, The Taper Man, will come out on 5th November 2026. Nick has been described as "JG Ballard's geeky younger brother" or "William Makepeace Thackeray on acid", and compared with both Thomas Pynchon and Haruki Murakami. The Guardian said of him that "his great gift as a novelist is to merge the pace, wit and clarity of the best ‘popular’ literature with the ambition, complexity and irony of the so-called ‘literary’ novel” while NPR said he "makes you wonder why every book isn't this smart and joyous and beautiful and heartbreaking.” Two of his novels - The Price You Pay and Seven Demons - were written under the pseudonym Aidan Truhen. Carl Hiaasen said of The Price You Pay "You're mortified by the things you find yourself laughing at - and when you turn the page, there's more. Guess what: you keep laughing…This novel has high-octane everything”. COMING SOON: the TV show Kill Jackie, based on The Price You Pay, starring Catherine Zeta Jones and Daniel Ings. Nick Harkaway's real name is Nicholas Cornwell and he is the fourth son of the David Cornwell (who wrote as John le Carré) and his second wife Jane Cornwell. He was born in Cornwall in 1972 and moved to London while he was still a child. He was educated at Clare College, Cambridge before working in the film industry. He is married to Clare Cornwell (Clare Algar), who was the Executive Director of the human rights charity Reprieve before working at Amnesty International and the Sigrid Rausing Trust, and who is now managing director of John le Carré Ltd. In 2021, after the death of John le Carré, Harkaway took the writer's role in bringing the final unpublished le Carré novel, Silverview, to publication. He said then that the point of the exercise was that he be as invisible as possible. In 2022 he was called upon to do the final necessary work on A Private Spy, the collected edition of his father's letters, after his older brother Tim Cornwell, who was editing the work, sadly died. His other brothers Simon and Stephen Cornwell are the founders of The Ink Factory, the film and TV mini-studio behind The Night Manager TV show. He lives in London with Clare and their two children, and a very needy dog.