Stairwell books is proud to present its featured authors to a wider public. All of our authors have been entertaining local audiences with their stories for many years and it is only fitting their best material should be published.

N.E. David

N.E.David is the pen name of York writer Nick David. Nick began writing at the age of 21 but like so many things in life, it did not work out first time round. Now older - and hopefully wiser - he has taken it up again and has produced a series of short novellas the latest of which, A Day At The Races, was launched at the Malton Literature Festival in October. He maintains he has no personal or political message to convey but that his objective is merely to entertain the reader and he hopes this is reflected in his writing. Besides being a regular attendee at The Spoken Word open mic, Nick is also a member of York Writers Group. He is currently working on a debut novel, Birds Of The Nile, which he hopes to have available for publication soon. More...

John Gilham

John began writing and publishing his poetry in his teens and early twenties. After completing his education at Edinburgh and York, and a gap to experience some real life, John began writing again in the 1980s. John has been published in numerous magazines including Acumen, Dreamcatcher, Aireings, Pennine Platform, Other Poetry, The North and The Rialto. John’s poetry is also included in Stairwell’s Exhibitionists, The Green Man Awakes and frisson. Fosdyke and Me and Other Poems, published in conjunction with Fighting Cock Press is a semi-autobiographical (it didn’t all happen quite like that) reminiscence of his early years growing up under the flight path at Heathrow in postwar Europe. The book also uses these experiences to express his own frustration at the folly and destruction of war. More...

PJ Quinn

PJ Quinn is the pen name of mother and daughter team Pauline Kirk and Jo Summers. Jo challenged her mother to write a crime novel and, somehow, ended up writing it with her. The result is a series of detective novels featuring DI Ambrose and Chalk Heath, set in the late 1950s, a period of great change that seems like an era ago. Foul Play is the first novel, to be followed by Poison Pen and Close Disharmony. For more information on either Pauline or Jo, click on their names above on on their pictures to the right. More...

John Walford

A graduate of the Skipton Writer’s Informal Group, John has been reading his finely observed essays with considerable acclaim to York audiences for some years. His stories were selected for publication in The Exhibitionists and the railway writing anthology Along the Iron Veins. John has long been interested in outdoors pursuits and in spite of the revelatory nature of his stories John is a very private person; it only recently emerged that John’s alter ego is the cartoonist Wally who appeared in Friends of the Earth newsletters during the 1990s. More...

Tim Ellis

Tim is a conservationist turned landscape gardener with a passion for poetry and bird watching. His first book was a collection of forty sonnets around a theme of birds called Birds of the World in Colour, published by Flarestack in 2003. His poems have appeared in many magazines including The Dalesman, Orbis and the Poetry Society’s Poetry News.  He has won prizes in the Kent & Sussex and Nothampton Literature Group competitions, and was once long-listed for the Bridport Prize; and most recently in York and Huddersfield. More...

No less important is Tim’s partner, artist Robbie Burns, who collaborated with Tim to illustrate his poems. While still at art school, she won the Wynkyn de Worde Society competition and illustrated an edition of Phillip Larkin’s The Whitsunday Weddings.  She next embarked on a career as a freelance illustrator; her work appearing in the Radio Times; The Spectator and the Observer magazine. Some examples of Robbie’s work are included in her extended biography.

Michael Hildred

Lecturer and artist Michael Hildred, grew up in Selby during the war, sang in the Abbey choir, experienced first hand the Selby floods of 1947 and made a name for himself for his significant contributions to art education while Head of Art and Design in a large community comprehensive school in Sheffield and at the Department of Aesthetic Studies at Moray House College of Education in Edinburgh.

Michael now lives in East Yorkshire where he continues to paint but also writes poetry. Michael is a popular poet and is loved all around East Yorkshire, York and Leeds.
More...

Jackie Simmons

We first published Jackie in our very first anthology A First Tuesday in Wilton where she stood out as a woman who would speak her mind. She is a daring surrealistic writer who lives near Trumbull in Connecticut; occupies Wall Street; and turns her razor sharp microscope on the world around her. More...