STEPHEN CHALKE

Stephen Chalke was born in Salisbury in 1948 and now lives in Bath. After some years of working in adult education, he took up writing about cricket in 1997. His first book, Runs in the Memory, a portrait of county cricket in the 1950s, was Frank Keating’s Sports Book of the Year in The Guardian, and he has followed this with a number of books exploring cricket’s past in his own distinctive style: story teller, social historian, explorer of memory and, in the words of one enthusiastic reader, ‘campaigner for real cricket’.

At the Heart of English Cricket – based on the life and memories of the former administrator Geoffrey Howard – won the Cricket Society Book of the Year prize while his collaborations with Bob Appleyard (No Coward Soul, jointly written with Derek Hodgson) and Tom Cartwright (The Flame Still Burns) were both the Wisden Book of the Year, making him the first author to win the award twice.

He writes a monthly column for The Wisden Cricketer and has also contributed historical articles to The Times. In 2008 he collected these up in a volume, The Way It Was, which won the National Sporting Club and Cricket Writers' Club's Cricket Book of the Year award.

In the summer of 2009 he was recruited by Winsley Cricket Club in Bradford-on-Avon to captain their newly formed third eleven. Miraculously he survived all summer without injury, and his team - a delightful mix of young and old - won promotion to the dizzy heights of Wiltshire League's Division Seven.

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