Gareth Russell

Who is Gareth Russell?

Gareth Russell is a British author, best known for writing the novel Popular and its sequel, The Immaculate Deception. Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, he attended Down High Grammar School from the age of eleven to eighteen. He later studied Modern History at the University of Oxford, attending St. Peter's College. After that, he completed a postgraduate degree in medieval history at Queen's University, Belfast.

Russell is the author of a series of plays about the French Revolution, including The Audacity of Ideas and All Those Who Suffered. His other plays include Appeasement, Magdalene, The Mysterious Case of Elizabeth Barton and 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 has subsequently been published in the United States of America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. It was published in German as It-Girls by S. Fischer Verlag in 2014. It has also since been adapted for the stage.

A sequel to Popular, The Immaculate Deception, was published in November 2012.

Russell is the son of former football manager and he currently lives in Belfast.