Stephen Dando-Collins

Author Stephen Dando-Collins

Stephen Dando-Collins is an award-winning Australian historical author and novelist, with books centred on Antiquity, American history, British history, Australian history, and French history. He is considered a world authority on the legions of ancient Rome.

He also writes children's novels, the first of which, Chance in a Million, (Hodder Headline, Sydney, 1998), was filmed by PolyGram as Paws, starring Billy Connolly. In 2012, he launched the critically acclaimed Caesar the War Dog series of children's novels, based on the true stories of modern day military dogs serving in Afghanistan and elsewhere, with the fifth in the series published in 2016.

He also contributes articles to various journals such as BBC History Magazine and Australian Heritage Magazine, and lectures about his books around the world.

Dando-Collins was born in the Tasmanian city of Launceston on May 1, 1950, and went to school in Hobart. As a teenager he played drums in several rock bands including Tangerine Cobweb, and at the age of 19 he was co-founder and first secretary of the Van Diemen Light Railway Society, which went on to create the Don River Railway, outside Devonport, Tasmania, today one of Australia's largest steam preservation railways. Dando-Collins confesses to still having steam in the blood.

After working in advertising in Australia and Britain as a graphic designer, copywriter, creative director, and senior advertising agency executive, he became an independent marketing consultant in Sydney for several years. He ran the Australian operations of an American market research company before moving to Noosa Heads, and then to the Tamar Valley in Tasmania, where he writes full-time. He and his wife Louise, also an author, live in a former nunnery.

Dame Marie Bashir, then Governor of New South Wales, Louise Dando-Collins, Stephen Dando-Collins, and launcher Booker Prize-winning author Tom Keneally, at the Museum of Sydney launch of Stephen's Captain Bligh's Other Mutiny, 2007.

Pasteur's Gambit won Dando-Collins a 2009 Queensland Premier's Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary awards.

His work has been translated into a dozen languages around the world.

In 2014, Dando-Collins and his wife founded the highly successful Festival of Golden Words, which became the Tamar Valley Writers Festival in 2016.

Since his groundbreaking 2012 work Legions of Rome, (Quercus, London), Dando-Collins has focused on American World War II history and the biographies of Australians who have made a mark on the world stage. His next books will include a previously untold epic American wartime POW tale, and, in 2016 and 2017, two major biographies.

website: www.stephendandocollins.com [1]

Books

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Tuesday, February 23, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.