Robert Harbinson, the pseudonym usually employed by Robert Harbinson Bryans Biography

Irish short-story writer and autobiographer, born in Belfast. He worked for a time on a dredger in Belfast Lough before deciding to become a medical missionary. He studied theology at the South Wales Bible College and subsequently taught in Canada and Venezuela. After giving up theology he took up diamond prospecting in Canada and South America. During the 1960s he wrote many travel books under his second pseudonym, Robin Bryans. Harbinson produced four volumes of autobiography, No Surrender: An Ulster Childhood (1960), Song of Erne (1960), Up Spake the Cabin Boy (1961), and The Protégé (1963), which recount his early life in working-class Belfast and portray Ulster as immutable and claustrophobic, permanently over-shadowed by the events of its distant past. Harbinson has also written two collections of short stories, Tattoo Lily and Other Ulster Stories (1961) and The Far World and Other Stories (1962), fictions based upon episodes from his life. In more recent years, he has worked as an opera librettist in London.