Gareth Russell (author)


Gareth Russell is a British historian and author.

Early life and education

Gareth Russell was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He attended Down High Grammar School, and later graduated from Saint Peter's College, Oxford, where he studied modern history. Russell completed a Master's degree in medieval history at Queen's University, Belfast. He currently divides his time between Belfast and New York.

Career

Russell is the author of a series of plays, including The Gate of the Year. In July 2011, his first novel Popular was published in the UK and Ireland by Penguin, as the first in a new series of novels following the lives of a group of privileged Belfast teenagers. It was published in German as It-Girls by S. Fischer Verlag in 2014. A sequel to Popular, The Immaculate Deception, was published in November 2012. Both novels were subsequently adapted for the stage in Northern Ireland, followed by a final theatrical sequel, Say You'll Remember Me, which received its first performance in 2016.
In August 2014, his first non-fiction book The Emperors: How Europe's Rulers were Destroyed by World War One was published by Amberley Publishing. In 2017, his biography of English queen consort Catherine Howard was published, based on research undertaken between 2010 and 2016. It was published by Simon & Schuster in the US and Canada, and HarperCollins in the UK, Ireland, and most of the Commonwealth. It was a finalist for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography award in 2017, which was won that year by Edmund Gordon's biography of Angela Carter. In 2019, his account of the Titanic disaster was published as The Darksome Bounds of the Failing World in the UK and The Ship of Dreams in the US. It was named a Book of the Year by The Times and a Best History Book of 2019 by The Daily Telegraph.

Novels