About Me - David Stedman

My name is David Stedman. I was brought up, and have lived for most of my life, in Bedfordshire in England. When I was a young child during the 1950s my parents bought a set of encyclopaedias for the family. Today, over fifty years later, they still stand in pride of place on my bookshelf. Upon opening the pages of these encyclopaedias I was immediately transported into the fascinating world of knowledge and facts, and that love has stayed with me ever since.

I began my working life as an apprentice in the printing trade. I was restless to see the world and spent several years travelling and working in Africa, America and on cruise ships as a printer. The lotus-eating had to stop and with the old trade of hot metal printing being made obsolete by modern technology, I moved into retail management for several years, which I enjoyed and which introduced me to many interesting people and places.

Throughout this time, however, I had always wanted to write books but the age old imperative of having to earn a living always got in the way.

Then a new door opened and I discovered a talent I didn't realise I had and became involved in the world of competitive general knowledge quiz playing. Eventually I created a national postal and email quiz tournament entitled Quizmail that ran here in the UK from 1991 until 2009. In 2003 I was fortunate enough to win the title of Radio Four Brain of Britain and also became joint champion in the grand final of the excellent long-running Channel Four quiz series Fifteen-to-One. In 2006, I was the joint runner-up in the grand final of the BBC television Mastermind series.

As research for the specialist subjects required by Mastermind I studied the lives of the Baroque ‘bad boy’ artist Caravaggio and the English King Edward I. I became so fascinated by their life stories that I wrote two novels based upon the true facts of their lives, That Terrible Shadowing about Caravaggio and The Chronicles of Pauncefoot and Longshanks.

Since the demise of Quizmail (the coup-de-grace applied by ever more powerful internet search engines) I have written two more novels. Settling is very loosely based on my own experiences and is a bitter-sweet tragi-comic examination of love, relationships and getting older, and the ever growing influence of internet dating sites in bringing people together, even in the evening of their lives. How little we know of each other, even after a whole lifetime together.

The Silk Fist Conspiracy is a thriller inspired and based on many of the sins and corruptions of modern life, especially the over-riding power of money and the big banks, the self-preservation instincts of the political elite, and the evermore intrusive snooping of governments in our lives as recently brought to light vividly by news stories from the USA. The story features tough action but also interesting characters and is purely intended as a 'rattling good yarn'.

My interest in facts and knowledge, and my love of writing, burns brighter than ever and I offer the reader my books and the ‘Fascinating Facts’ section to share some of the fascinating nuggets of truth that I have learned after being immersed in studying and general knowledge for all these years.