Stephen Foster was a writer of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction included the short story collection, It Cracks like Breaking Skin (Faber, 1999), which was nominated for a MacMillan PEN Award. His first novel, Strides (Faber, 2001), was, according to the Financial Times, ‘an engaging and breathtakingly vital love story of a modern madman’. Stephen’s second novel, Are You With Me?, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2007.
His non-fiction titles are: She Stood There Laughing (Scribner, 2003), The Book of Lists, Football (Canongate, 2006), and Walking Ollie (Short Books, 2006). She Stood There Laughing – after a line from the Tom Jones song, ‘Delilah’ – is an account of a season spent following his team, Stoke City, in company with his young son. It was one of the top-selling sports books of 2003. Walking Ollie, the story of Stephen’s difficult relationship with his lurcher, was a Sunday Times best-seller.
Born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1962, Stephen worked as a chef, minicab driver, and in the building trade before enrolling at Norwich School of Art and Design in 1994. A graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at UEA, he lived in Norwich with fellow writer Trezza Azzopardi.
