Tom Stacey's adventurous life has given him extraordinary tales to tell. A born writer, he offers us reflective wisdom put down memorably and pleasurably in a unique voice. His work has been acclaimed by writers as varied as Nina Bawden, Philip Zeigler, Rowan Williams, Christopher Hill and Orville Prescott.

‘TRIBE is a thrilling adventure ... The reader is lifted by Tom Stacey's boundless commitment and sincerity‘ Mark Amory, Spectator

‘How gratifying it is — at a time when our best writers are churning out a book a year in a frantic effort to hold their position in the rat race — to encounter a writer who stays silent until he really has something to say’ Scotsman

First entering equatorial east Africa’s glacier-clad Mountains of the Moon fifty years ago, Stacey has been repeatedly caught up in the turbulent history of the region’s Bakonzo tribe, among whom he is now a mzee, an adopted elder. His life work, TRIBE, is a major piece of travel literature and an 'autobiography' of a place and its people, interwoven with his own story.

Born in 1930, Stacey grew up in London and the Scottish Highlands and was educated at Eton. He edited The Eton College Chronicle with Douglas Hurd, won the essay prize, founded the philosophical group Wotton’s Society — which flourishes to this day — and was a solo chorister. He went on to join the Scots Guards, and aged 19 was sent to Malaya. On leave from duties he disappeared into the jungle and lived with aboriginal Temiar tribe. The diary he kept of this journey resulted in the book The Hostile Sun, awarded The John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.

His career as a journalist kicked off when he became staff writer for Picture Post at 22. He moved to the Daily Express, and then the Sunday Times as Chief Roving Foreign Correspondent. In 1961 he received the Granada Award for Journalism as Foreign Correspondent of the Year. The John Simpson of his day, Stacey covered major events worldwide from the Congo, S.E. Asia and the Middle East to the Bay of Pigs. He interviewed legendary world leaders Khrushchev in the Kremlin, Indira Gandhi, Salvador Allende, Ayub Khan, Chiang Kai-Shek, and African leaders Amin, Obote, Lumumba, Nyerere, Kaunda…

Aged 24, Tom Stacey’s first journey across Africa ending in his prolonged study of the Bakonzo of the Ruwenzori Mountains with Isaya Mukirane, inspired his internationally acclaimed, landmark novel, The Brothers M. About two men and the communication and conflict between two worlds, it offered a deeper understanding of the African dilemma than any hitherto published work. In 1962 Mukirane led a rebellion in the Mountains of the Moon, which Stacey had unwittingly seeded. The following year he was invited by Uganda's Milton Obote to try to help settle the revolt. This experience informed Stacey’s next work of non-fiction, Summons to Ruwenzori.

Stacey’s reputation grew with subsequent novels, receiving rapturous reviews: The Living and the Dying (1976), The Pandemonium (1980), The Twelfth Night of Ramadan (1983), The Worm in the Rose (1985), and Deadline (1988) which was dramatised for TV starring John Hurt; to distinguish the novel from the film, the editing of which the author was outraged, the reprint is entitled The Man Who Knew Everything (Capuchin Classics, 2008). The novel Decline followed in 1991.

Meanwhile Tom Stacey’s first collection of long-short stories, Bodies and Souls (1989), has been followed by a steady stream of shorter fiction, mostly published in the US literary journal Confrontation, and include: The Same Old Story (1997), The Tether of the Flesh (1998), Golden Rain (2001), Grief (2004), The Swap (2006) and Mary's Visit (2008). Publication of these and other shorter fiction, in collected volume form, is in view.

As a publisher, Tom Stacey launched the international current affairs service for schools and colleges, 'Correspondents Worldwide', in 1968, assembling the talents of several distinguished former colleagues of international journalism, and later sold to Pergamon. In 1969 his first book publishing imprint Tom Stacey Ltd, whose wide rage of titles and publishing projects included the (ecological) 'Prospect for Man' series, and under Stacey's editorial supervision, the 20-volume 'Peoples of the Earth' direct mail series, ultimately published in 14 languages.

Stacey’s first eponymous imprint was superseded in 1974 by Stacey International, of which he has remained CEO and Chairman, with a list originally specializing in works about Islam, Africa, and Asia; but latterly expanding into UK-based general publishing.

His considerable energy led him into national politics in the 1960s, seeing Stacey standing twice for Parliament for the Conservatives, but withdrawing in 1967 from his eminently winnable candidature at Dover on the grounds of political life curtailing creative spontaneity. Since 1974 he has been a prison visitor, and in 1981 he conceived the electronic tagging of offenders in lieu of custody to reduce crime, taking his feasibility study to the Home Office and launching the Offender’s Tag Association in 1982; he remains Director of that research and lobbying group. He has seen the introduction of the idea into the penological tariff since 1989 and the subsequent nationwide usage of the electronic tag in the monitoring of offenders or bailees. Stacey is repeatedly called upon by the media to explain or defend the method and value of tagging, as the scheme approaches the availability of round-the-clock surveillance by means of the satellite tag.

In 1999 Stacey conceived and organised Pilgrimage 2000 in which Christians of all denominations joined in walking towards Canterbury (Iona, Lindisfarne, St David’s Head, St Michael’s Mount, Whitby, Holywell, Walsingham, and St Paul’s Cathedral) to herald the Third Millennium.

Tom Stacey and his wife, the widely-exhibited sculptor Caroline Stacey, have 5 children, numerous grandchildren and great grandchildren. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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