NEWS AND EVENTS

Meanwhile, as a writer of literary fiction, Stacey has produced a steady stream of long-short stories since the later 1990s. all published in the New literary magazine Confrontation These include The Same Old Story (1999), The Tether of the Flesh (2001), Golden Rain (2002), Grief (2004), The Swap (2006), Boredom, Or, the Yellow Trousers (2007), Mary’s Visit (2008), The Kelpie from Rhum (2009). These stories will in due course be collected in two further collections of long-shorts, following the Heinemann publication of Bodies and Souls.

The new paperback edition of his 1988 novel Deadline was published by Capuchin Classics as The Man Who Knew Everything in 2008, to be hailed by John Gray as ‘a near forgotten masterpiece’ and chosen by him as his Book of the Year for the New Statesman that year. In the context of that work and of Capuchin Classics, Tom Stacey will be speaking at the Campden Literary Festival in May 2012.

Work-in-hand includes The Making of a Kingdom, being the updated and revised edition of his African magnum opus, Tribe, the Hidden History of the Mountains of the Moon. to include the formal establishment and recognition of the Kingdom of Rwenzururu by the Government of Uganda in 2009, at which Stacey was a guest of honour, Stacey sowed the seed of the Kingdom in 1954, together with Isaya Mukirane, father of Omusinga (King) Charles Wesley Mumbere, the present ruler of the new Bantu Kingdom, one of the five constituent Kingdoms of southern Uganda.

On the launch of his work Tribe, Tom Stacey was a guest speaker at the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival in 2004. Earlier that year he had addressed the Royal Geographical Society on the theme of the work and his life-long involvement with the people of the Ruwenzori Mountains.

Stacey looks ahead to the return to print of his major first novel The Brothers M (1960), which is substantially set in the Ruwenzori mountains, and is preparing a screen-play for film of that drama. He has a further drama screen-play in development, with the working title Bye-Bye, Mister Deboulay.

As founder, in 1947, of Eton College’s Wotton’s Society (devoted to philosophy), Tom Stacey addressed the Society on its 60th anniversary at Eton in March 2007, with a paper on the theme of ‘A Sanctity to Ethnicity’. This followed his address to the Society on its 50th anniversary on the theme of ‘Is Man Advancing?’ .

As a long-time supporter of the work of English PEN on behalf of writers persecuted abroad and the elimination of political and ideological censorship, Tom Stacey opens his house and garden on Kensington Church Street annually as the venue for English PEN’s garden party, at which the PEN/Ackerley Prize for literary biography is awarded.

With the publication of The First Dog to be Somebody’s Best Friend 2007, Tom Stacey entered a fresh genre for his gifts, that of children’s literature. That book followed his entry into the field of biography, with his monograph on his great-great-grandfather, Thomas Brassey, the Greatest Railway Builder in the World (2005), marking the bi-centenary of his ancestor’s birth.

Tom Stacey sustains his role as the country’s principal independent in support of the tagging of offenders, as an alternative to imprisonment, in his function as Director of The Offender’s Tag Association (www.offenderstag.co.uk) .

For further information please contact Max at Stacey International Publishers
tel + 44 (0)207 221 7166 or email <marketing@stacey-international.co.uk>