Occupation Author, Teacher Name Stephan Collishaw Nationality British Role Author | Genre Historical Fiction Books The Last Girl, Amber | |
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Education Goldsmiths, University of London | ||
Notable works The Last Girl
Amber | ||
Rebekah Lattin Rawstrone Interviews Stephan Collishaw
Stephan Collishaw is an author from Nottinghamshire.
Collishaw was born at Nottingham City Hospital. He studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he wrote several other substantial unpublished works, and based on an interest in history and literature, decided to become a teacher in 1991.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, Kristina and Gabriele, 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 By this time, he had written a total of three unpublished novels, and at his wife's urging, began taking his writing more seriously and took an MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University.
His first 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 (and contained numerous references to) Christopher Marlowe's play Tamburlaine, which had been a favorite of Collishaw's as a young man.
Collishaw's third novel, The Song of the Stork has been acquired by Legend Press. The Song of the Stork is set in Lithuania during the Second World War and tells the story 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. The novel is a love story and a coming-of-age tale. It is about a young woman finding her voice as around her the voices of her community are extinguished.
Stephan also edited Any Place But Home which contains personal histories of seven Lithuanians who settled in England's East Midlands in the 1940s.
His brother is Mat Collishaw the artist.