Stephen R. Bown has been writing about adventurers, travellers and explorers for many years. His book Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail was an international critical success and was selected as one of the Globe and Mail’s Top 100 books of 2004. His next book, A Most Damnable Invention, was shortlisted for the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction and the Canadian Science Writers’ Association Science in Society Book Award. Madness, Betrayal and the Lash was shortlisted for the Lela Common Award for Canadian History and won the BC Book Prizes’ Booksellers’ Choice Award. His most recent book, Merchant Kings, was also shortlisted for the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction. Bown is, according to the Globe and Mail, “emerging as Canada’s Simon Winchester.”

Bown was born in Ottawa. He graduated with a degree in History from the University of Alberta. After living in St. John’s, Vancouver and Ottawa, he now lives in the Canadian Rockies with his wife and two children.