Stuart Blackburn

I was born and educated in the US, getting my PhD in South Asian Studies at UC Berkeley in 1980.  After teaching at various universities in America and Europe, I moved to London with my wife for a job at SOAS, University of London in the 1990s.  That led me to years of fieldwork on tribal communities in northeast India. In 2010, I retired and we moved again, this time to Brighton, where we now live. 

I sometimes say I'm a 'recovering academic'.  After many years of field research and monograph writing about storytelling traditions in India, I wanted to write my own stories but shifting from fact to fiction wasn't as easy as I thought.  That's what I like about writing novels-- like any craft, you can get a little better at it every day.

Several of my novels have been set in India, although more recently I find I want to explore an historical period in a North American context. My lastest book, 'Luck of the Draw, is partly based on my experiences during the Vietnam War era, the anger at the senseless killing and the fear of being drafted to fight and possibly die in it.  Currently, I am working on a story set during another wartime.  It's December 1941 in San Francisco.  I have the characters but not the plot yet.  That's another of the joys of writing fiction.  You never quite know where your characters are going to take you.  And, hopefully, readers have the same pleasure.