Dr Mark Stibbe is the winner of the first ever Page Turner Award for Fiction Writing (2020).

Mark has been publishing books since he was 16 and has clocked up over 50 titles of his own. Most of these have been religious nonfiction books released through traditional publishing houses, but lately he has focused on writing novels in the magical realism genre. Mark has also ghost written over thirty books for clients of his company BookLab, which aims to turn good writers into great authors. Mark's PhD on storytelling was completed in 1982 and published by Cambridge University press. In recent years, he has been a judge for the Page Turner Awards.

Mark's twin sister Claire is also a full-time novelist; her genres are crime-oriented. In 2021, Claire won the Page Turner Award for fiction writing one year after Mark won the same prize. This makes Mark and Claire a unique phenomenon in the publishing world - twins who have won the same award in consecutive years. This will not come as a surprise to those who know them; their adoptive father was a star pupil and friend of CS Lewis. He was also at Merton College Oxford when J.R.R. Tolkien was professor of English at the same college!

Mark is now a full-time writer who lives in Kent with his wife Cherith and their Black Labrador Bella.

The covers below represent a selection of Mark's very varied titles.

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 
My Favourite Genres
Month
September