MG Harris
MG Harris read Biochemistry at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford and remained in Oxford to take a D.Phil. in Molecular Biology, before writing the year’s No. 1 bestselling debut young adult novel, “The Joshua Files: Invisible City“.
Maria was born in Mexico City, where her parents failed miserably to get along, resulting in divorce – scandalous for both families who belonged to the strictly Roman Catholic, Mexican middle-class. Her mother (who was about fifty-eight times better looking and more fascinating than Maria could hope to be even on a good day) threw caution to the wind and took off for Germany to work as a stewardess for Lufthansa with Maria (aged 4) and Maria’s baby sister.
She would have been raised as a little Deutscher madchen except for the fact that her nanny – a young aunt who had been coerced to tag along with her big sister – decided that life in dreary Frankfurt was no fun, and with no warning, took herself off back to sunny Mexico… leaving four-year old Maria and baby sister “home alone” in their Frankfurt apartment for a day and night.
Horrified, her mother returned home from flying to find everything in order, except for an empty jar of Nutella.
With no resident nanny, things had to change. Maria’s mother agreed to marry her English boyfriend, a cellist with the Halle Orchestra: which is how Maria and sister moved to Manchester, England. It was there that she first discovered the two principal passions of her early life: “Doctor Who” and Manchester United. At the age of twelve, “Blake’s Seven” took over from “Doctor Who”.
Mexico and the Maya
Maria continued to regularly visit her father in Mexico, the director of a copper mining company. When she was debating whether to become a scientist or to study cinema, he gave her this sagacious advice: “Your first duty is to be a person of the Renaissance.”
At fifteen, she visited for the first time the Yucatan region of Mexico, methodically visiting all the Mayan ruins in sweltering heat. In a Cancun hotel bookshop she bought “Mysteries of the Ancients” by Eric and Craig Umland – a non-fiction book positing the theory that the Ancient Mayan civilisation was a remnant of Atlantis, which itself was a colony of ancient extra-terrestrial visitors to Earth. The idea fascinated Maria. One night she asked her step-aunt, a lawyer in Cancun, what she thought of the theory. “Of course”, came the sanguine reply. “Most of the locals here have known that for centuries.”
Back in Mexico City, Maria headed straight for the Museum of Anthropology, bought a stack of stout, sober archaeology books by the great Mayanist scholars. Thus began a life-long fascination with the field of Mayan archaeology.
College and Catastrophe
Meanwhile, for her “formal” education, Maria had begun to study biochemistry at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. The plan was to get a place in the subject for which she knew she’d achieve the best grades, and then to spend all her free time with the film-making society. Quite unpredictably, however, she fell madly in love with molecular biology to the exclusion of any other idea for a career.
Obsessed with molecular biology and its potential for the emerging industry of biotechnology, Maria immersed herself entirely in the world of science. Summer jobs with the hottest new biotech company in the country followed, then a doctorate, and then post-doctoral research fellowships.
In 1986, she arrived one evening in Mexico City with her sister and mother to learn that her father had that day suffered a massive heart attack. He’d only survived because of the fact that his office was on the same street as a hospital. After a by-pass operation in Houston, Texas, it seemed as though he would recover. Two weeks later back in Oxford, Maria learned that he’d had another attack. This time, he’d died.
Having lost the most significant influence in her life at the age of twenty, she took months to recover. The experience of bereavement, however, was to be something of a practice run. Five years later her mother was taken ill whilst visiting Mexico City as part of the Manchester Olympic Bid Team. Once again she arrived in Mexico to hear that a parent was at the point of death. Hours later, her mother died of viral encephalitis.
A Lucky Break
Maria began writing seriously in January 2005 after a skiing accident in Gstaad forced her to spend many weeks recuperating. With a ten-inch operation wound and five long pins in her tibia plateau, merely getting out of bed was a challenge. Her husband arranged a laptop on a chair by the bed and, for the next twelve weeks, Maria wrote her first novel – a techno-thriller which combined her two intellectual loves – molecular biology and archaeology. Like most first novels it was rejected by every agent who saw it.
It wasn’t the first time it had occurred to Maria to write. She’d tried her hand at screenwriting from the age of eleven, once winning a runner-up prize in a Blue Peter competition for “Grange Hill”. She returned to screenwriting in 2004, just failing to shortlist in a BBC New Talent contest to write a sitcom. If not for the hugely encouraging letter which the BBC New Talent team sent her, it’s likely that she’d have given up any hope of being a writer.
Media
MG Harris is a frequent media commentator and presenter. Here, she appears on the BBC’s Daily Politics show, arguing that the planned English Baccalaureate, with its focus on core subjects, risks marginalising less academic pupils.
