Chris Stewart

Chris Stewart was born in 1951, was briefly the original drummer for Genesis (leaving before they became famous), and spent his subsequent years as a sheep shearer in various countries before buying a remote farm in the Alpujarra mountains of Andalucia in 1988.

Driving Over Lemons (1999), the account of the purchase and the first years on the farm, was rejected by dozens of publishers before Sort Of Books took it on. It became a word-of-mouth phenomenon, selling over a million copies in Britain — the biggest success by far of a small independent publisher.

The book's appeal is partly the comedy of incompetence — Stewart and his wife Ana know nothing about farming, their neighbours are eccentric, the infrastructure is medieval, and the mule is always an obstacle. But it is also about choosing a life at a deliberate distance from contemporary convenience, and this theme resonated with readers in a way that the author himself found somewhat surprising.

A Parrot in the Pepper Tree (2002) and The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (2006) continued the series. Stewart has also written about travels in Patagonia (Three Ways to Capsize a Boat, 2010) — an account of his early life as a sailor, written with the same mixture of comic disaster and genuine pleasure.