Photo by Paul Blakemore
Bio
Stephen Lightbown is a Bristol-based poet, performer, picture book writer, and disability rights champion. Drawing on over 30 years of lived experience as a wheelchair user, Stephen uses his voice to explore and challenge perceptions of disability. He is the author of two poetry collections for adults and the critically acclaimed children's collection, And I Climbed, And I Climbed—which was shortlisted for the CLiPPA Poetry Award and the UKLA Book Awards.
He has spoken at events across the UK and at festivals such as Shambala, Womad, Verve Poetry Festival and Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival.
In addition, he has written and performed the one-person play A Life With PIP, about his experiences navigating the disability benefits system.
Stephen is also the author of the picture book My Dad Can (published June 2026), for which he drew on his experiences as a disabled parent. His second poetry collection for children will be published in early 2027.
He can be found on most social media channels via @stephen.lightbown and is available to present talks and workshops on a range of issues including accessibility, disability poetry and our relationship with water.
When he isn't writing, he can be found in the sea, having twice represented England at the World Disabled Surfing Championships.
Stephen is represented by children’s Literary Agent Alice Williams.
Praise for Only Air
Thanks to Stephen Lightbown's first book of poems we get to see through the eyes of a wheelchair user. Where a beach can be "a war, a match raging between ears", where "seats can applaud" in football stadiums, where your own wheelchair can be a person waiting for you to wake up. Almost anything in Stephen’s poems have the potential to walk. These are straight-talking autobiographical poems which are traumatic, celebratory, humorous and always more than one thing. That is what I know about living with a disability, we have to write our narratives, because the ones written about us, the ones that reduce us to benefit scroungers or pitiful charity cases speak against our complex humanity and Stephen with every poem he writes, gives us an honest glimpse into his.
Raymond Antrobus
Praise for The Last Custodian
A compelling and formally inventive collection of poems that is also a sweeping story, Stephen Lightbown’s The Last Custodian chronicles crisis, and questions our ideas of memory, survival. When towns become ‘laden crematoriums’, when tragedy takes everything, at that last moment, last stand: there is still a music. ‘I have to hear a sound,’ writes the poet, ‘even if it’s played / to photographs’. Coming, as it does, in this moment of global pandemic, The Last Custodian will touch many a reader with its unrelenting, questioning, echoing voice. A moving, inimitable book.
Ilya Kaminsky