Widely known for his inspirational and soul-searching memoirs Michael chronicles an ordinary life in memories and meditations, exploring spiritual pathways in a post secular society.

Staring At Lakes was published by Hachette to great critical and popular acclaim. It won the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards Non-Fiction Book of the Year and the John Murray Show Listeners Choice Award Book of the Year.

This was followed in September 2014 by his book Hanging with the Elephant and by Talking to Strangers in October 2016.

On Tuesdays I'm A Buddhist was published in October 2017.

Chest Pain: A Man, A Stent And A Camper Van described as a memoir about togetherness and what it means to be alive was published in May 2020.

What is Beautiful in the Sky: A book about endings and beginnings was published in October 2020.

In October 2021 Michael’s most memorable musings on the human condition were brought to life by illustrator Jacob Stack in the collaboration A Cloud Where the Birds Rise. In this beautifully illustrated collection, the reader is held in moments of belonging, solitude, love and healing as we witness the beauty of falling snow, the pain and love of goodbyes, and the shared lives and deaths of neighbours amid the sweeping landscape of Ireland.

All the Things Left Unsaid: Confessions of Love and Regret was published in October 2022 by Hachette Books Ireland. It explores how while in recovery from surgery, Michael travelled to a cottage on the Atlantic coast where he wrote letters, with an intimacy not previously risked. Letters that would never be posted but that appear now in a vulnerable and beautifully wrought collection of insights into life, death, friendship and love.

Michael’s latest book I Loved Him From The Day He Died: My Father, Forgiveness and a Final Pilgrimage was published Hachette Books Ireland on 3rd October 2024. The book follows Michael on his Camino de Santiago Walk for his 70th birthday where accompanying him on his 126-kilometre walk in the heat of the Spanish sun, was the ghost of his long-dead father, a distant and aloof figure whom he lost when he was only twenty-two years old. Here, with searing honesty and beautifully wrought prose, Michaael examines how this man, who had died almost half a century ago, could have had such a profound effect on the writer's life.

Michael is also the author of such plays as Strawboys, Una Pooka, Misogynist, Hubert Murray”s Widow, Sour Grapes, and Amazing Grace, all produced by the Abbey Theatre, and more than a dozen other plays for leading Irish Companies. He has published three novels: Priest (1986), The Trouble With Sarah Gullion (1988) and Bird in the Snow (2008).

Praise for Staring At Lakes

“Hilarious, and tender, and mad, and harrowing, and wistful, and always beautifully written. A wonderful book”

Kevin Barry, author of City of Bohane

Praise for Hanging with the Elephant

“A compelling memoir. Absorbing and graced with a deceptive lightness of touch, [Hanging with the Elephant] is clever and brilliantly pieced together. Harding writes like an angel”

Sunday Times

“Wonderful ... Like many people who have achieved a great deal, [Harding] cannot recognise his triumphs. This book, like its predecessor, is one of them”

Irish Times

“The writing is simple...The detail is forensic. The smells, the sounds and the memories of the house and its chatelaine described beautifully and without embellishment, one word following another, perfectly judged and placed, like literary feng shui”

Irish Independent

Praise for All the Things Left Unsaid: Confessions of Love and Regret

“A beautiful book of great tenderness, love of life, and wisdom learned the tough way”

Joseph O'Connor

“There are certainly plenty of riches to mine in All The Things Left Unsaid: engaging observations, well-turned tales and aphorisms”

RTÉ Guide

“Rambling along the northern shoreline, through the seasons, and around his rich storehouse of memories, Harding balances his familiar delightful whimsical pondering with much serious thinking. This is a book to read and reread. And it is comforting, like the sound of the sea”

Irish Times

“Michael's new book, All the Things Left Unsaid: Confessions of Love and Regret, opens up a new angle on the art of letter writing”

Ireland's Own

Rights Sold

All titles: Hachette Books Ireland (UK & Commonwealth)