Winner of the inaugural Page Turner awards, Mark Stibbe PhD has loved storytelling since he was a child. Born in 1960, he was adopted and inspired by Philip Stibbe, a star pupil and friend of CS Lewis at Oxford. Mark became a senior scholar of English Literature at Cambridge University where he was awarded a double first and won the Cambridge University Comic Verse Prize in 1982.
During rare days off in his first job as an ordained minister (in Nottingham, UK), Mark somehow managed to research and write a PhD about storytelling which was subsequently published by Cambridge University Press in their prestigious monograph series in 1992. A series of acclaimed academic books followed and these are now required reading in universities all over the world.
As an ordained minister in the Church of England, Mark went onto write many nonfiction books on spirituality and in 2010 won Christianity's book of the year for his book 'Breakout', co-authored with Andrew Williams, in which he and Andrew told the story of the extraordinary missional growth of St Andrew's Church Chorleywood under his leadership between 1997-2009.
Mark has also given testimony on national TV to his historic abuses by the evangelical barrister and judge John Smyth QC. He has campaigned for justice for the victims of abuse within a religious context, including speaking at the House of Lords. He wrote the foreword to the pioneering book Escaping the Maze of Spiritual Abuse by Lisa Oakley and Justin Humphreys.
In 2012 Mark left the ordained ministry and migrated to fiction writing. In 2020, he completed A Book in Time and submitted it to the Page Turner Fiction Awards. He won the Writing award for Fiction. Today, Mark is a full-time writer who lives in Kent with his wife Cherith and their Black Labrador Bella. Together they run BookLab, dedicated to helping good writers become great authors.
Mark loves this quote:
“There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.”
W.H. Auden
