Stephen Robinson is a biographer, journalist and speech writer for a wide range of publications and clients in the UK and beyond. He has written obituaries and profiles of numerous distinguished and disreputable figures in Britain, South Africa and the United States for publications including the Financial Times, the Times, the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph, The Spectator and Business Day (Johannesburg).
For most of the 1980s he was based in southern Africa reporting on the last gasps of apartheid, and he witnessed Nelson Mandela walk to freedom in February 1990. He then moved to the United States, where he spent the following decade as staff Washington correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, reporting on three presidential elections and travelling widely across America. Subsequently he became Foreign Editor, and then Comment Editor, of the Telegraph, overseeing the paper’s coverage of UK and world politics. Though by then based in London, he continued to travel extensively to China, Australia, South America, India, Russia, and most parts of Europe.
He is the author of the critically acclaimed The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes, published by Little Brown, and of Against All Odds, which chronicled Margaret Thatcher’s successful 1975 campaign for the leadership of the Conservative party. His writing career has brought him into contact with numerous international figures and he has interviewed Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Presidents Clinton and Bush, Tony Blair, Boris Johnson, David Cameron and George Osborne. In the world of arts, he has also interviewed James McAvoy and Forest Whitaker, and travelled to Mozambique to write a major interview/profile of Henning Mankell shortly before his death.
Stephen Robinson now also works as a speech writer, assisting those in the corporate and financial spheres to hone their speaking skills while advising clients on their public profiles.
He is himself an experienced public speaker, appearing regularly at literary festivals and other platform events, where he chairs panel discussions on a variety of subjects ranging from history to politics to business affairs. He has appeared on Radio 4’s Today programme and Radio Five Live, and on National Public Radio in the United States. Married with three children, Stephen Robinson lives and works by Regent’s Park within a lion’s roar of London Zoo.