Paul E. Hardisty Bio

The biography that underpins Paul E. Hardisty’s fiction is not the kind you can invent. It has been accumulated over decades in places where things regularly go wrong.

He has roughnecked on oil rigs in Texas, explored for gold in the Arctic, mapped geology in Eastern Turkey (where he was befriended by PKK rebels), and rehabilitated water wells in the wilds of Africa. He was in Ethiopia in 1991 as the Mengistu regime fell, and was bumped from one of the last flights out of Addis Ababa by bureaucrats and their families fleeing the rebels. In 1993 he survived a bomb blast in a café in Sana’a.

He was one of the last Westerners out of Yemen before the outbreak of the 1994 civil war.

These are not researcher’s notes gathered at a safe distance. They are the experiences that gave him Claymore Straker.

The Claymore Straker Series

When an oil company engineer is hijacked by Islamic terrorists and forced to investigate a mysterious illness afflicting a small Yemeni village, the result is a stunning debut thriller, the first in the Claymore Straker series.

That book, The Abrupt Physics of Dying, was published by Orenda Books in 2015.

It was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger and was a Telegraph Book of the Year.

The protagonist Claymore Straker is

an ex-South African paratrooper trying to escape his violent past, now working as an engineer in the petroleum industry in the dangerous lands of Yemen.

As the country descends into civil war and village children start dying, Clay finds himself caught up in a ruthless struggle between opposing armies, controllers of the country’s oil wealth, Yemen’s shadowy secret service, and rival terrorist factions. As Clay scrambles to keep his friend alive, he meets Rania, a troubled journalist.

The first four novels in the Claymore Straker series, The Abrupt Physics of Dying, The Evolution of Fear, Reconciliation for the Dead, and Absolution, all received great critical acclaim.

Reconciliation for the Dead takes Straker back to South Africa to testify to Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, exploring true events from one of the most hateful chapters in South African history.

Turbulent Wake

Between the Claymore Straker series and the climate trilogy, Hardisty published Turbulent Wake (Orenda Books, 2019), a deliberate departure.

A stark, eye-opening and exquisitely poignant novel spanning the globe and probing the issues that define our times: Ethan Scofield returns to the place of his birth to bury his father, and hidden in one of the upstairs rooms of the old man’s house he finds a strange manuscript, a collection of stories that seems to cover the whole of his father’s turbulent life. As his own life starts to unravel, Ethan works his way through the manuscript, trying to find answers to the mysteries that have plagued him since childhood.

Publishers Weekly described the novel as “searing … at times achieves the level of genuine poetry.”

Hardisty described it himself as “a departure from the stuff I’ve done before, more literary, about love and loss and regret and growing old.”

The Forcing Trilogy

Climate has always been the connective tissue between Hardisty’s professional and literary lives, and The Forcing (Orenda Books, 2023) makes it explicit.

In a near future where a government of youth has taken power in North America, a policy of institutionalised ageism has been introduced. All those older than the prescribed age are deemed responsible for the current state of the world, and are to be “relocated,” their property and assets confiscated. David Ashworth, known as Teacher, and his wife May, find themselves among the thousands being moved to “new accommodation” in the abandoned southern deserts.

The novel was shortlisted for the Crime Fiction Lovers’ 2023 Awards.

Its follow-up, The Descent (2024), and The Hope (2026) continue to consider a near future impacted by climate change.

The concluding volume is set in 2086, when climate collapse, famine and war have left the world in ruins. In the shadow of the Alpha-Omega regime, descendants of the super-rich architects of disaster, sixteen-year-old Boo Ashworth and her uncle risk everything to save what’s left of human knowledge, hiding the last surviving books in a secret library beneath the streets of Hobart.

Non-Fiction: In Hot Water

In Hot Water: Inside the Battle to Save the Great Barrier Reef was published in 2024 by Affirm Press.

Hardisty found himself in the middle of the ideological fight over the reef’s future during his six years as CEO of the Australian Institute of Marine Science. In the book, he dives into the history of the reef and cuts through the rhetoric to chart the circumstances and acceleration of its decline, as well as the determined efforts to save it.

In Hot Water was shortlisted for the 2025 WA Premier’s Award for non-fiction.

Academic and Science Writing

Fiction and policy-level science sit alongside each other in Hardisty’s output.

He has written a substantial body of technical journal papers covering water resources, pollution clean-up, climate change, and environmental economics, along with two textbooks, both published by CRC Press in New York.

He was Director of CSIRO’s climate adaptation and land and water science programmes from 2013 to 2017, before moving to AIMS.

The Writer Behind the Science

His work has taken him to some of the world’s most dangerous places, including Yemen, Ethiopia, and most recently Ukraine, which he visited in 2022, 2024, and 2025, working on a new book about the war.

The Ukraine material is Hardisty operating exactly as he always has: going to the place, getting it right, and then making it into something worth reading.

He has said of himself that he doesn’t actually think of himself as a crime writer, “more as just a writer.”

Given that his shelves now hold hard-edged geopolitical thrillers, a lyrical literary novel, climate-emergency speculative fiction, environmental non-fiction, and academic textbooks, that description fits rather well.