Tap the gear icon above to manage new release emails.
Follow Richard Tomlinson to get new release emails from Audible and Amazon.
Before turning to fiction, I divided my time between academia (in Australia, the USA, and South Africa) and urban policy consulting across Southern Africa.
As an ACADEMIC, either in full-time or visiting capacity, I have been located in Australia at the University of Melbourne (Chair of the Urban Planning Program); in South Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand; and in the USA at Columbia and New School Universities and MIT, and in think tanks at the Brookings Institution and the Wilson Center; and at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy. A Fulbright Scholar, I did my PhD at Rutgers University.
As a post-1990 CONSULTANT based in Johannesburg, Richard’s clients in Southern Africa included the post-apartheid South African governments various local and international NGOs, the World Bank, USAID and the private sector, during which time he also facilitated multi-party negotiations. He has also worked with community organizations.
FIRST VIOLIN is a serious novel. It required a couple of years of research, including valuable periods at the Library of Congress and the Holocaust Museum, and time in Vienna, a wonderful city. The novel is set in Vienna and a Mauthausen subcamp from just before the 1938 Anschluss to the Soviet-controlled period of 1945. The story follows Klaus, a violinist and Mischling of the second degree, and those close to him—his wife Helga, his lover Eva, his friend Johann, his daughter Ilse, and his mother Rosa—as they navigate daily life under the Nazis. Through music, personal compromise, and quiet resistance, they survive, except that Helga's experiences scar her "recovery". During the war, Johann joins the Nazi Party to keep his business. After the war Klaus is co-opted by the Soviets for propaganda performances. The novel balances historical events—Hitler’s Heldenplatz speech, the 1934 uprising, two pogroms, the bombing of Vienna—with private struggles and moral ambiguity. Music is central: it sustains Klaus in the camp and shapes his return to Vienna. A Jewish identity emerges as a key theme in the narrative.
THE BOLOGNA MIRACLES 1498 is an unserious novelette. It offers a satirical take on present-day academia and the Church—made possible by the safe historical distance of early-Renaissance Italy. The idea was sparked by reading that physicists can’t disprove the possibility of time travel. De Biaggi is both a brilliant physicist at the Catholic University of America and a religious zealot who, endlessly mocked by colleagues, employs his breakthrough discoveries regarding time travel to relocate to Bologna in 1937, the year his grandparents left for the USA. He makes an error in his calculations and arrives in 1948. It’s purely coincidence that, circa 1498, Michelangelo, Copernicus, and Cardinal della Rovere, the Archbishop of Bologna, the next Pope, were in Bologna, with Leonardo da Vinci just down the road.
Read more
Read less
