Skip to main content

Debora Harding

Biography

Debora Harding

Debora Harding has had varied professional experiences including work in national U.S. politics for 10 years, co-founding the UK’s first local terrestrial television station, and management of a bicycle business. She sits on the Advisory Board for the Hart Center for Public Service. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The Daily Mail and Unbound, as well as other publications. She spent her childhood in Nebraska and Iowa, and lives in Hampshire with her husband, the writer Thomas Harding. She is the mother of two children, Kadian and Sam.

Debora Harding

Books by Debora Harding

Dancing with the Octopus: A Memoir of a Crime
by Debora Harding - Memoir, Nonfiction

When Debora Harding was just 14, she was abducted at knifepoint from a church parking lot. She was thrown into a van, assaulted, held for ransom and left to die. Debora survived. She identified her attacker to the police and then returned to her teenage life in a dysfunctional home where she was expected to simply move on. Denial became the family coping strategy offered by her fun-loving, conflicted father and her cruelly resentful mother. It wasn't until decades later --- when beset by the symptoms of PTSD --- that Debora undertook a radical project: she met her childhood attacker face-to-face in prison and began to reconsider and reimagine his complex story.