Stephan Bollinger is a storyteller by compulsion, a wordsmith by passion, a speaker, photographer and former singer and musical theatre performer, who couldn't imagine any other calling than the arts. With a flair for the theatrical, a weakness for metaphors, and a caffeine dependency best described as character-building, he has spent a lifetime collecting stories.
Before becoming an author, he was a photographer. Before that a designer. And before that, a singer, loving the limelight. Every step cumulative, not to replace the ‘before’, but to inform the next, to add to the creative arsenal.
He writes the way he speaks, with curiosity, humour, unexpected detours and the occasional sentence that arrives nowhere. And he's ok with that. He believes the best stories are not always the most obvious, or the loudest ones. Often they are found hidden inside ordinary moments, in quiet corners, where nobody thought to look.
Whether speaking to an audience or writing with little respect for grammar, his approach comes from experience, trial, triumph, and the kind of beautifully embarrassing failures that make the best stories. The goal is simple: make people think, and leave them looking at the world just a little differently than before. Emotional, never academic, always entertaining.
Stephan’s convinced that everything and everyone has a story. His research is relentless, the footnotes real, and counting on forty-five years of experience in front and behind lenses, his tangents are amusingly intentional.
He finds the extra in ordinary, the forgotten or overlooked, deserving a spotlight, to share them, with honest respect, the quirk of a grown-up child, and a subdued amount of truly colourful fanfare.
