Stephan Collishaw
'Collishaw's characters are delicately created and endearingly human', Celeste Hicks
'An incredibly timely book about the human upheaval in all its emotional forms' Rosie Garthwaite
Stephan's latest novel is 'A Child Called Happiness'(Legend). Three days after arriving in Zimbabwe, Natalie discovers an abandoned newborn baby on a hill near her uncle’s farm.
115 years earlier, the hill was home to the Mazowe village where Chief Tafara governed at a time of great unrest. Faced with taxation, abductions and loss of their land at the hands of the white settlers, Tafara joined forces with the neighbouring villages in what becomes the first of many uprisings.
A Child Called Happiness is a beautiful and emotive work of historical fiction. This is a story of hope, resilience and reclamation, proving that the choices made by our ancestor’s can echo for many generations to come.
The third novel by Stephan Collishaw is 'The Song of the Stork'(Legend), about Jewish partisans in World War II.
The book opens with Yael, a fifteen year old girl on the run. She has escaped from a German raid on her town and is alone. Not knowing where to turn she goes to the farm of a young Russian. Aleksei is considered mad by the town’s inhabitants. He is mute and lives on his own, shunning company. With reluctance Aleksei takes her in and as the brutal winter advances a brittle relationship forms between the two. As the war continues Yael joins a Jewish partisan group fighting and surviving in the woods. 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 is the author of two previous novels. The Last Girl and Amber (Sceptre). The Guardian wrote that The Last Girl was ‘astoundingly complex...tense, vivid, effortlessly real.’ He has been published in America and in translation. Stephan has taken a ten year break from writing as he has been consumed by his job as deputy head of a secondary school in Nottingham. Recently however he has managed to liberate some to in which to return to fiction.