Timothy David Harding was born in London in 1948, and began playing competitive chess at school. After reading Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, he was caught up in the Bobby Fischer boom and started writing technical articles and instructional books on chess.
In 1976 Tim moved to Dublin, Ireland, where he worked in various capacities on newspapers for almost 20 years, including theatre critic and foreign news page editor. He played on the Irish team at the 1984 Chess Olympiad in Thessaloniki, Greece, and is a Senior International Master of correspondence chess.
From 1996-2005 Tim edited the magazine Chess Mail and became increasingly interested in the history of the game, the subject of his latest books. In 2009 Trinity College Dublin awarded him a PhD for his thesis on chess history.
Since completing his doctorate, Tim has been teaching European history part-time and developing an historical project about links between Ireland and Burma/Myanmar, the country where his mother was born. He expects to publish on this subject in two or three years. Tim has posted some of his research articles online at http://www.chessmail.com. He also intends to release some of his older titles as e-books over the next year or two.
