Dr Thomas Halliday

@tjdhalliday.bsky.social

277 Followers 119 Following

Author of OTHERLANDS (Foyle's BOTY 2022) and its illustrated counterpart (Foyle's Children's BOTY 2025), currently writing a second adult book. Palaeontologist, sometime TV quizzer, international croquet player, lapsed choral singer.

Longlisted books for the Wainwright Prize. Otherlands is among them.
A sunset behind trees with scattered clouds in the sky.
Fragment from the libretto of Tippett's A Child of Our Time Narrator: Now in each nation there were some cast out by authority and tormented, made to suffer for the general wrong. Pogroms in the east. Lynchings in the west. Europe brooding on a war of starvation. And a great cry went up from the people. Chorus of the Oppressed: When shall the usurer's city cease? And famine depart from the fruitful land? Tenor: I have no money for my bread; I have no gift for my love. I am caught between my desires and their frustration as between a hammer and the anvil. How can I grow to a man's stature?
Poem, provisionally entitled Reflections of a Palaeoclimatologist. Warming is a sign. I'm raw. Evasion Late, I ravel. Din. Atone (not an Agnus Dei - fie!) Rob million in oil libretti (Messel?) Past age begat sapless emitter. Billion in oil. Limbo reified. Sung, an A tone. Not an idle varietal. No. I save. Warming is a sign. I'm raw.
Speech by Charli Thompson in Barnet Council. She begins by dismissing a heckle demanding her, a disabled woman, to stand, before addressing the democratic concerns she has with the proposed changes to the council constitution, and the lack of visibility, accountability, and democratic representation that it will engender. The gallery applauds at the end.
A scrumpled leaflet in the form of a letter using a typeface that looks kind of handwritten. It complains about translation services for "those who refuse to integrate".
News headline, with picture of dog in front of vets "Vets must publish prices and pet prescription fees to be capped at £21, watchdog says"
The Fossil and the Find A screech unknown of old, in timeless ear, lyric. Hesitance. Storied dynast I, lying, rained on, scar-praised, end-rite so define. Stream browns and stone seethes. A mesa crumbled - be for each a cocoa. Time-travel. Linger. Either ego, or a clever sediment, or else wiser end, erases sayer. A scree chunk now. No fold in time less early riches it. Ancestor. I eddy nastily, ingrained on scarp. Raise dendrites' ode. Finest ream - brown sandstone. See - the same sacrum bled before. A Chaco-coati met, ravelling ere I there go. Oracle-versed, I mentor, elsewise render as essayer.
An 18th-century coded (but actually far future) leader on a throne with a very very tall periwig, a fat body, tiny short legs and a teddy bear. He is laughing with his mouth wide open. An advisor in a long green robe with a long grey beard stands nearby.
A fleeing cartoon blue grand piano with eyes under fire by laser beams in the dark city streets.
A blue cartoon grand piano with eyes and with the keys as teeth, in which are sitting a worried looking tuba, a triangle with a baseball cap, and a blonde girl with a bandana. It's a still from Oscar's Orchestra.
The stack of books shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards. These are: False Calm, Small Earthquakes, A Training School for Elephants, Moonlight Express, Is A River Alive?, Somebody is Walking on Your Grave, Cautery, Tamarin, I Gave You Eyes And You Looked Towards Darkness, A Splintering, The Two Roberts, Theft, The Girl Who Raced The World, Epic Cities, The Lost Book of Undersea Adventure, The Atlas of Languages, Race to the South Pole, and right at the bottom, the tallest book, Otherlands.
It's me! I'm wearing my blue top and white trousers that is the Scotland croquet kit, wearing a gold medal and holding a silver salver, standing on a lawn.
A cluster of white snowdrops in bloom amongst a green flowerbed.
Screenshot of emails Epstein: dinosaur and fossil hunting with Jack Horner on the ranch, found 90 million year old clams and fossils. Right up your alley. Maxwell: love that - didn't we go fossil hunting with him and Bobby Kennedy in N Dakota? Epstein - yes
Extract of Robert Burns' "When Princes and Prelates". The original text is "By sea and by shore! the Emperor swore, In Paris he'd kick up a row; But Paris saw ready just leugh at the laddie And bad him gae tak a mowe. Auld Kate laid her claws on poor Stanislaus, And Poland has bent like a bow: May the deil in her arse ram a huge prick of brass! And damn her in hell with a mowe" The Emperor here is the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II who became involved in the French Revolutionary wars in an attempt to annex part of France. For those who don't understand Scots vocabulary, "Gae tak a mowe" means "Go fuck yourself". Kate is Catherine II of Russia, who had just partitioned the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, destroying the countries until they became independent in 1918.
A Christmas tree decoration of a 3D printed bright red Thylacoleo skull with a Father Christmas hat.
Brown roll-rim mushroom. Classic golf tee shape, brown with speckly white edge to the head. Deadly.
10 copies of Otherlands Illustrated, with big dinosaur eyes on the cover, in which is reflected a fabulous scene of rearing sauropods. Ferns adorn the cover, and one book is open showing the story of the asteroid at the last mass extinction.
From the top of a little hill in the centre, the glass Harpa building looking sleek and modern, dark and glassy, next to a building made to resemble lots of sedimentary rock layers with strange long horizontal windows peeking between them. There are ships in the harbour behind, hills far away, people going for walks.
Hallgrímskirkja, the big Lutheran church that dominates the skyline from all directions. It looks like a sine wave of basalt columns rising to the clock tower. In front, a statue to Leifr Eiriksson, the leader of the first European group to land in North America. Above, *such* blue sky.
The oldest team in the competition, but one with plenty of experience and the best Scotland squad ever. In the picture, Stephen Wright, our #1 for the competition, and Scotland's first ever international croquet player, having started as a teenager in the 1970s. Martin Murray, our captain and Scotland's most capped player who was top 5 in the world in the 80s and is still formidable. And Mark Shanks, Stefan Colling, and Thomas Halliday, three players who have been voted most improved over the last few years. Gie's but the mallets, we've the will. Auld Scotland counts for something yet.
A child sitting on the sofa totally engrossed in Otherlands, the illustrated edition.