About

Kenneth Paul Stephen is the author of the Forgotten Scotland Mini-reads series. An award-winning writer, he won a Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award in 2010/2011 and the David Toulmin short story prize in 2010. His short stories have been published in leading UK literary magazines and anthologies.

Kenneth has worked as a journalist for 25 years. He has founded two media companies, Capital City Press in Edinburgh, and now Heartland Media and PR, a Perthshire-based PR consultancy.

A former employee of the Daily Record, he represents Scotland’s gamekeepers, stalkers and ghillies in the media and his PR clients include author Ed James, Penguin UK, and Britain’s biggest selling debut crime writer, James Oswald.

He is happily married with three children and three cats.

You can follow him on Facebook.

The Other Stuff:

Kenneth Paul Stephen was born into a family of agricultural workers. At the age of 4, he moved from Dumfries to a small village outside Forfar with a handful of houses and no shop called Padanaram.

When Kenneth arrived in Padanaram, it was snowing. He ate lots of it. He had never seen snow before. In the Bible, Jacob did something fairly inconsequential in Padanaram, before the Cream Crackers period of his life which was, commercially, more successful.

Kenneth’s early love of books stemmed from smelling the interior of the mobile library van which toured villages below the Angus glens.

Despite retaining his family’s affinity with the land, he left home, studied Philosophy and Politics and began a career as a journalist.

In 2005, he traveled with his wife and family, living and working in France, initially in a 1973 Award Globestar caravan with no boiler and an erratic water supply. Attempts to fix said water supply resulted in the delivery of impromptu electric shocks which have affected him ever since.

Upon returning to Scotland, he established Heartland Media and PR and started writing short fiction (with several lengthy and un-planned writing breaks) from 2006 onwards.

He is happily married to Clare and has three unique and much loved children, Freya, Lachlan and Darroch.