Stephen Jaques

I'm still working out what kind of novelist I am. Three books in, the answer seems to be: a different one each time.

I came to writing late and by accident. A carpenter and joiner by trade, I was fifty-three and had never written anything longer than a work report when my wife Tracey died in 2022. What followed should have been straightforward grief. It wasn't — the funeral itself went badly wrong, in ways that made the national press and left me with a complaint upheld against a company that faced no consequence for it. Bonkas came out of that: a dark, funny, unreliable-narrator novel set in supported housing, written by someone who had worked in it for years and knew exactly how the place sounded at three in the morning.

I wasn't sure whether I was a one-time author or something more. So in 2025 I resigned as a support worker and wrote The Barn Door Stayed Closed — the story of a twelve-year-old farm boy, told entirely in his own voice, after a line in a government budget takes his grandfather from him. All profits go to RABI, the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution.

My third novel, Clonfert, is a dual-diary story of the Great Famine and its long reach: a woman in County Cork in 1845 and a woman in Illinois in 2025, writing on the same dates, one hundred and eighty years apart. I named it before discovering that Clonfert is the real parish name for Newmarket, County Cork — the town it's set in, and where my own family are buried.

A poetry collection, Lunatics & Space Age Watches, is on its way.

I publish through my own imprint, Small Hinges — named after a saying I've kept since I was a boy. Small hinges swing big doors.

I still live in South Wales. Still learning the craft.