Stephen Chalke


Stephen Chalke is an English author and publisher. In an article in the 2010 edition of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack he is identified as "an author, publisher and captain of the Winsley Third XI".
He has two undergraduate degrees – one in Drama, English and Philosophy, the other in Mathematics – and a postgraduate degree in English Literature. He has taught in adult, further and higher education, but since the late 1990s he has increasingly concentrated on writing and publishing. He works for the Open University.
Chalke's cricket-writing career began after he received some bowling coaching from the former Somerset player Ken Biddulph in the early 1990s. He wrote down some of Biddulph's reminiscences, then interviewed other players from the 1950s and collected their cricket memories into his first book, Runs in the Memory. None of the publishers he approached thought the book was commercially viable, so he formed his own publishing firm, Fairfield Books, and published it himself.
Through Fairfield Books, Chalke has written and published several highly acclaimed biographical and historical cricket books. His collaboration with the late Geoffrey Howard, At the Heart of English Cricket, won the 2002 Cricket Society Book of the Year Award, and he has twice won the Wisden Book of the Year award: in 2004 with No Coward Soul and in 2008 with Tom Cartwright - The Flame Still Burns. In 2009 he won the National Sporting Club's Cricket Book of the Year with The Way It Was - Glimpses of English Cricket's Past, a collection of more than 100 articles written for The Wisden Cricketer, Wisden Cricket Monthly and The Times. The Way It Was won the 'Best Cricket Book' category of the 2009 British Sports Book Awards. In the 2010 edition of Wisden, he contributed a 10-page article on English cricket and the Second World War.
The Cricket Society awarded him the inaugural Ian Jackson Award for distinguished service to cricket in 2009. The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians named him Statistician of the Year for 2015 for his contributions to the field of cricket history.
Chalke retired from Fairfield Books at the end of 2019 having run it more than 20 years. During that time Fairfield produced 40 books, of which Chalke wrote 17. Other authors include David Foot, John Barclay, Peter Walker, Mark Wagh and Simon Lister.

Publications