Stephan Collishaw is a British author of historical fiction. The Independent chose his first novel, The Last Girl (2003), as one of its Novels of the Year. In 2004 Stephan was also selected as one of the British Council's 20 best young British novelists.
Alongside writing and teaching, he runs Noir Press, a boutique publishing house dedicated to showcasing Lithuanian fiction in translation.
As a teenager, Stephan Collishaw wrote poetry. His older brother Mat Collishaw was an artist and had a calling for it from a young age. It was inspiring, but Collishaw had to create their own space and thus turned to writing instead of art.
Stephan studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he wrote several other substantial unpublished works. After university, Collishaw attempted to write a novel set in Zimbabwe, but the manuscript was lost.
With encouragement from his wife to take it seriously, Stephan Collishaw applied and successfully got into the Nottingham Trent University MA in Writing program. His tutors were Graham Joyce and Mahendra Solanki. In this course, Collishaw wrote his first published novel, The Last Girl.
It is a story about an elderly and impoverished poet in Vilnius. The author's interest in Lithuania stems because his wife, Marija, is Lithuanian.
He followed with a second novel, Amber, in 2004. Also, set in Vilnius, it was inspired in part by (and contained numerous references to) Christopher Marlowe's play Tamburlaine, a favorite of Collishaw's as a young man.
Collishaw's third novel, The Song of the Stork, was published by Legend Press. The story is set in Lithuania during the Second World War and tells the narrative of the brittle, unlikely relationship between a 15-year-old girl, Yael, and the mute outcast Aleksei against the background of the Jewish partisan resistance.
In 2018 Legend Press published Collishaw's fourth novel, A Child Called Happiness. Set in Zimbabwe, the book explores two stories of struggle over a ranch in the Bindura valley.
Stephan Collishaw also edited Any Place But Home, which contains personal histories of seven Lithuanians who settled in England's East Midlands in the 1940s.
Stephan Collishaw now works as a teacher in Nottingham, having also lived and worked abroad in Lithuania and Mallorca, where his son Lukas was born.
