Stephan Collishaw

Stephan Collishaw is an author from Nottinghamshire.

Collishaw was born at Nottingham City Hospital.^[1] He wrote his first novel at the age of 16, an unpublished work he subsequently described as "unremittingly awful".^[1] He studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he wrote several other substantial unpublished works, and based on an interest in history and literature, decided to become a teacher in 1991.^[1] On a whim, he relocated to Vilnius in 1995, where he met and married a Lithuanian woman^[1] named Marija, who had been teaching him Lithuanian.^[2] Marija already had two daughters from a prior relationship.^[2] The family lived in Palma de Mallorca for two years, where Marija gave birth to Collishaw's son Lukas,^[2] and then the family relocated to Nottinghamshire in 2001.^[1] By this time, he had written a total of three unpublished novels, and at his wife's urging, began taking his writing more seriously and took an MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University.^[1]

His first professional novel, The Last Girl, about an elderly and impoverished poet in Vilnius, was completed in 2001^[1] and published in 2003. In a favourable review for The Guardian, Julie Myerson described it as "astoundingly complex for a first novel", and also commented favourably on the reserved and un-flashy tone of Collishaw's prose.^[3] 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, which had been a favorite of Collishaw's as a young man.^[2]

Stephan also edited Any Place But Home which contains personal histories of seven Lithuanians who settled in England's East Midlands in the 1940s.^[4]

His brother is Mat Collishaw the artist.

External links

• Review of The Last Girl in j.
• Review of Amber in The Independent
• Review of "The Last Girl" in Lituanus

References