About

Born just outside Liverpool, I only discovered I had an accent when aged 14 we moved to Derbyshire – none of my fellow school kids could understand a word I was saying. Not being too good with my fists, but ever the quick learner, I managed to change my diction. Although wanting to go to university, I only found my direction after a meeting with a careers advisor, who suggested microbiology. After seeing my blank expression, he handed me a book to look it up, where I got to marine biology first and decided that sounded way cooler. Despite being warned it wouldn’t be like Jacque Cousteau diving on the Great Barrier Reef, after a UK undergraduate degree, I proved the naysayers wrong when a PhD scholarship took me to Far North Queensland. Some years later, I decided research wasn’t for me, although I had found my future wife! After many years of travelling to short field contracts with no fixed abode, she was the first to crack and retrained as a teacher, but not before we had our first foray into literature, with a coffee-table book about the Turks & Caicos Islands, published through Macmillan. Now with a fixed base, I had a go at working for myself as a graphic designer / photographer, but found I was far more proficient at creating a debt than any clients. Eventually, my wife said the classic line, “You need to find yourself a new life, or a new wife…” so I stuck with the original model and followed my mother’s suggestion of becoming a paramedic. Although the transition wasn’t smooth, requiring a fill-in role as a Scenes of Crime Officer, I made it out onto the icy roads of Norfolk in my first ambulance back in January 2004. A few years down the track, Queensland was poaching qualified UK paramedics, and we jumped at the chance, emigrating back to Australia with our two young boys, and have lived in Brisbane ever since. Always wanting to do the best for my patients (even if it’s telling them they don’t need an ambulance), I qualified as a critical care paramedic in 2010 and have remained on road ever since.

Everyone knows a paramedic and all paramedics have a story to tell, it’s how we cope with the sometimes confronting nature of our job. Inevitably, when the yarning starts, the stories we tell are full of embellishments and always served with a heavy dose of dark ambo humour. In an effort to capture the flavour of this tradition, I started writing a series of short stories, each one based on my own frontline experiences, but totally fictionalised to protect all concerned (see Disclaimer).

The crazy plan was to create one story for each of the major AMPDS codes, the system used worldwide to categorise emergency calls. Crazy? Because there are thirty-two codes, so it took me six year to complete! Each story is available as a single eBook, or in one of three eBook collections, with The Complete Collection available as a printed book. I’ve also embarked on a ‘tetralogy’ of novels featuring the same characters, with the first one a murder mystery called Dead Regular, the second an action thriller, Beneath Contempt, the third a terrorist plot, High Acuity, and the last a mystery thriller, Show Cause. You can read the full text of each of the first chapters by clicking ‘Read for Free’, along with two of my short stories. And all my books can be found under the Purchase menu. Enjoy!

Harry Colfer is the pseudonym of an experienced critical care paramedic with twenty years of on-road experience gained in both England and Australia. With his role being one of the highest trained prehospital clinicians, he regularly attends cardiac arrests, multi-system trauma and major incidents. As a way of dealing with his inevitable demons, he embraced the cathartic paramedic custom of storytelling and began writing in his spare time. Using his knowledge of the subject area, he created a series of short stories, Ambo Tales from the Frontline, eventually publishing one for each of the thirty-two codes used to categorise emergency calls. Although his stories are fictional, the clinical details and interventions are all accurate, thereby giving the reader an entertaining education in the frontline emergency world. Beyond this, his main protagonist, Jono, often says and does the things Harry wishes he could get away with, and that’s perhaps why he goes by his pen name.

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The Australasian College of Paramedicine ‘Response‘ Magazine – Summer 2024
A storied career: award-winning author and QAS paramedic has the write stuff

Read the full article here.

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The Shift Extension (www.theshiftextension.org) – December 3, 2021
An Interview with Paramedic Author Harry Colfer

Read the full article here.

Well, I guess it’s somewhat nice that I’ve received enough awards to put them on their own dedicated page! 😉

Please CLICK HERE to view them.