H. S. Bhabra

Hargurchet Singh Bhabra (June 7, 1955 - June 1, 2000) was a British Asian writer and broadcaster who settled in Canada.

Bhabra was born in Mumbai, India and moved to England with his family in 1957. The family eventually settled in Beare Green, Surrey. From 1966 to 1973, Bhabra attended Reigate Grammar School. He was the only boy of Asian origin in the school, was highly regarded by his teachers, and an accomplished actor in school productions such as Much Ado about Nothing. Regarded by his teachers as the most exceptional member of an exceptional year, he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford where he studied English Literature.

Bhabra worked for six years in financial advertising in the City of London. In 1984, he resigned to complete Gestures, a novel on which he had been working for years. He travelled and worked as a correspondent for a few years, which provided material for his career as a writer of fiction, under his own name and also as A M Kabal and John Ford. Gestures won a Betty Trask Award in 1987. It has been described thus: "With extraordinary force and subtlety, Gestures conducts the 'funeral rite over an entire way of life. . . a liberal, human, European culture which has finally disappeared'. The lines could stand as an epitaph for Bhabra himself. Infused with his own erudition, elegance and empathy, it was also - and to a great degree - an expression of his own sense of displacement." Indeed, although he published in quick succession three thrillers — The Adversary (1986) and Bad Money (1987), and Zero Yield — the next few years were spent largely on travels to Egypt, Mexico and Latin America.

In 1989, Bhabra was awarded the first Fulbright Chandler Fellowship in Spy and Detective Fiction Writing. This prize included a post as writer-in-residence at the University of California, Los Angeles for one year. Bhabra stayed on in Los Angeles from 1991 to 1993, hoping to earn money as a scriptwriter. That did not work out, however, though his fund of esoteric knowledge did help him win a handsome sum as a contestant on a television quiz show, Jeopardy!, an accomplishment of which he remained proud. While there, he also developed an obsession with climbing bridges, which led to his arrest while making an assault on the Golden Gate, San Francisco. Bhabra also taught at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

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