I've been reading under the covers with a torch since I was old enough to know my parents would disapprove. I haven't really stopped since.
My name is Stephen Harrington, and I'm an author living in London. When I'm not writing or working, you'll usually find me rolling on the floor with my dogs.
I grew up on Bradbury, Tolkien, and Pullman, which probably explains a lot: strange worlds, ordinary heroes, the sense that something vast is hiding just beneath the surface of things. The science fiction I've gravitated to since, Banks, Dick, the quieter and stranger end of the tradition, has pulled that in a different direction. Looking back, I can also trace the influence of writers I absorbed as a teenager without fully understanding why, Zindel among them, that raw emotional honesty, the pressure placed on young people in worlds that don't quite hold together.
For the past fourteen years I've been building The Youngling Trilogy, a dark fantasy story about a girl named Synesthesia, a wanderer named Seth, and a creature called the Griffinkat. The tale crosses two worlds, the Midgarden and the Manheim, and has followed me through just about every season of my life. After all the drafts, rewrites, and late nights, the trilogy is complete and out in the world.
Alongside it, I've been writing Talos, a psychological sci-fi series that starts in hard science and slowly loses its mind. Where The Youngling begins in myth and finds structure underneath, Talos begins in structure and gradually dissolves into myth. Both are asking the same question from opposite ends: what happens when the reality you trusted turns out to be something else?
Outside of writing, I have a stubborn habit of taking things apart and making new ones: flutes, cigar box guitars, and whatever else comes to hand. It keeps creativity moving when I'm not at the keyboard.
If there's a thread running through everything I write, it's this: ordinary people facing extraordinary things, with a little courage, a little fear, and whatever light they can carry.
The Youngling Trilogy is finished. More stories are coming.
I write about the reality of finishing books around a full life, the psychology of long projects, and what it actually feels like to make things. You can follow along at Writing in the Margins on Substack https://sharrins.substack.com/
