Alexander Fiske Harrison

Background & Personal Life

He is the youngest son of Clive Fiske Harrison, chairman of Fiske plc, where he is also a non-executive director. His brother Jules William Fiske Harrison was, according to The Times, a "famously skilled and fearless skier" who died in a skiing accident in Zermatt, Switzerland in 1988.

Fiske-Harrison studied biological sciences and philosophy at the University of Oxford and as a posgraduate at the University of London. He also trained at the acting school the Stella Adler Conservatory in New York City when Marlon Brando was its chairman. (He was consultant on the Universal Pictures' documentary on Brando, Listen To Me Marlon.)

Journalism

Fiske-Harrison has written for various newspapers and magazine including The Times, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, GQ The Spectator, and Prospect and has been himself featured in magazines such as Condé Nast's Tatler.

He has been interviewed and provided commentary on various broadcast media outlets including the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, Discovery Channel, US National Public Radio. and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation National Radio.

He has also written in Spanish for ABC and El Norte de Castilla and has been himself featured in magazines such as ¡Hola! (Spanish parent of Hello! magazine.)

Conservation

Fiske-Harrison has spoken in interviews of his lifelong interest in conservation, and has written extensively on the related subjects of animal intelligence and animal welfare.

He has written on wolves and dogs, cattle and horses, and apes. He often focuses on human perception of, and interaction with, animals.

Bullfighting

A controversial essay on bullfighting for Prospect magazine in September 2008 led Fiske-Harrison to move to Spain to further research the topic. He lived, trained and fought alongside matadors including the one-eyed Juan José Padilla, Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez – whose father Paquirri was killed in the ring, and grandfather Antonio Ordóñez the subject of Hemingway's The Dangerous Summer – and Eduardo Dávila Miura of the famous Miura bull family. He wrote about his experiences on his blog The Last Arena: In Search of the Spanish Bullfight. In September 2009 the journalist Giles Coren visited him in Spain and described him as: "Very brave. Very British. Very Charge of the Light Brigade. Very trenches. Very scary."

Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight

In 2011 Profile Books published his Into The Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight. The Mail on Sunday gave it four stars, saying, "his descriptions of the fights are compelling and lyrical... One begins to understand what has captivated Spaniards for centuries." The Sunday Times said that "it provides an engrossing introduction to Spain's 'great feast of art and danger'", the Sunday Telegraph said, it was "a compelling read, unusual for its genre, exalting the bullfight as pure theatre," and the Financial Times called it, "an engrossing introduction to bullfighting."

In answer to Animal Welfare and Animal Rights concerns, the Daily Mail said that although Fiske-Harrison "develops a taste for the whole gruesome spectacle, what makes the book work is that he never loses his disgust for it," the Financial Times said, "it's to Fiske-Harrison's credit that he never quite gets over his moral qualms about bullfighting," and the Literary Review concluded: "The question of whether a modern society should endorse animal suffering as entertainment is bound to cross the mind of any casual visitor to a bullfight. Alexander Fiske-Harrison first tussled with the issue in his early twenties and, as a student of both philosophy and biology, has perhaps tussled with it more lengthily and cogently than most of us."

Bull-running

As part of his researches in 2009 Fiske-Harrison began running with the bulls in Pamplona, and became a part of the 'Runners Team of the World', and continued to do it across the rest of Spain, including the encierros, 'bull-runs', of the Navarran towns of Tafalla and Falces - where the run is down a mountain path beside a sheer drop called 'El Pilón'- in the Madrid suburb of San Sebastián de los Reyes and the ancient castle of Cuéllar in Old Castile, which hosts the oldest encierro, 'bull-run' in Spain, and where he was awarded a prize for writing about the encierros in 2013. He has written and spoken on the subject widely, including for Bear Grylls on the Discovery Channel and for the Esquire Network's coverage of the Pamplona running of the bulls.

Fiesta: How To Survive The Bulls Of Pamplona

In Spring 2014 Fiske-Harrison co-authored and edited the book Fiesta: How To Survive The Bulls Of Pamplona, published by Mephisto Press. It included a foreword from the Mayor of Pamplona and contributions from famous living aficionados of the festival of San Fermín, including John Hemingway, grandson of Ernest Hemingway, Beatrice Welles, daughter of Orson Welles, along with chapters of advice from the most experienced American and Spanish bull-runners such as Joe Distler, Julen Madina, Miguel Ángel Eguiluz and Jokin Zuasti and photographs from EPA veteran Jim Hollander. It caused headlines around the world when one of the contributors was gored by a bull soon after publication. Fiske-Harrison himself had been running with the same animal minutes earlier, although he was uninjured. In a feature on the event, the Daily Telegraph described Fiske-Harrison as "a stone-cold pragmatist with a poet's heart."

Drama

Fiske-Harrison's acting debut was as Govianus in The Second Maiden's Tragedy at the Hackney Empire theatre in London. He has also acted on the German stage and in independent film in the UK and Italy.

The Pendulum

The play is a two-act four-hander set in 1900 Vienna. Its first production was in the summer of 2008 at the Jermyn Street Theatre, in London's West End.

Michael Billington in The Guardian gave it three stars and said, "Fiske-Harrison has clearly done his homework: he understands, for instance, the tensions between Franz Joseph’s imperial benevolence and the antisemitism of Vienna’s populist mayor, Karl Lueger. The author himself plays the disintegrating hero with the right poker-backed irascibility... while it is refreshing to find a new play that gets away from bedsit angst, one wonders why Fiske-Harrison has tackled this subject now. If there are contemporary parallels, they are not obvious, and one comes away with the sensation of having seen an accomplished, but oddly impersonal, historical play." The Sunday Times described it as "something earnest, nicely acted – if a little contained – but as far from the wildness of Schnitzler or the darkness of Schiele as you can possibly imagine".