The Official Website of Internationally Best-Selling Author
Stephen R Lawhead
Stephen Lawhead has created all his life. Born in Kearney, Nebraska in 1950, he entertained his younger brother and sisters with amazing tales and slight-of-hand magic tricks. Later he learned to play electric guitar and played in not-bad bands through university and beyond. He studied art—primarily painting, sculpture, and ceramics—at Kearney State College, but whatever else he was doing, he was writing: poems, short stories, humorous essays.
His first professional work was done at Campus Life magazine in Chicago, where he was a staff writer and then editor. During his five years at Campus Life he wrote hundreds of articles and several non-fiction books.
In the misguided belief that writing wouldn’t pay, but music would, he moved to Memphis and formed his own record label. The record company failed, and the pressures of supporting a young family forced Lawhead to sit down and see if he could write a publishable novel. His first work, In the Hall of the Dragon King has been translated into a dozen languages, recorded in both unabridged and enhanced audio, and has never been out of print in the English language.
Book followed book, and in 1986 the Lawhead family moved to Britain so that Stephen could research and write THE PENDRAGON CYCLE. They settled there permanently in 1990, with some years spent living in Austria and a sabbatical in the United States. He is now a dual US-UK citizen.
In addition to his twenty-nine adult novels, he has written nine children’s books, many of them originally offered to his two sons, Ross and Drake. He is married to Alice Slaikeu Lawhead, with whom he has collaborated on books and articles. They make their home in Oxford, England. Lawhead’s non-fiction, fiction, and children’s titles have variously been published in twenty-four languages. He has won numerous industry awards and in 2003 was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by the University of Nebraska.
Whilst writing dominates his creative life, he still finds time to paint and sculpt, and he still likes to plug in his electric guitar.
