Stephan Collishaw

Who is Stephan Collishaw?

Stephan Collishaw is an author from Nottinghamshire.

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 He wrote his first novel at the age of 16, an unpublished work he subsequently described as "unremittingly awful". He studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he wrote several other substantial unpublished works, and based on an interest in history and literature, decided to become a teacher in 1991.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 By this time, he had written a total of three unpublished novels, and at his wife's urging, began taking his writing more seriously.

His first professional novel, The Last Girl, about an elderly and impoverished poet in Vilnius, was completed in 2001 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. He followed with a second novel, Amber, in 2004. Also set in Vilnius, it was inspired in part by Christopher Marlowe's play Tamburlaine, which had been a favorite of Collishaw's as a young man.