About Me — Stuart Aken

Stuart Aken
About Me Stories
Published in
6 min readAug 7, 2021

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Mugshot taken and supplied by the author.

My Bio:

So, who am I? The name’s Stuart Aken. It’s a pen name I use instead of my given name because Googling that listed thousands of websites, most by other writers. I decided to use a pseudonym, and to honour my biological father, who died 3 weeks before my birth. He was ‘Ken’ to everyone. I wanted to keep my own first name and surname initial, so came up with the name I now use. Googling it generally brings up items relating to me.

I’m 73, raised in Yorkshire, the largest county in England, but I see myself first as a citizen of the world, then European, English, and then as a Yorkshireman. Married to the love of my life with whom I have a beautiful, bright, daughter who lives in Australia and recently married her long-term boyfriend. I have an elder sister, an older stepbrother (deceased), a ‘twin’ stepbrother (deceased), and a half-brother, still very much alive despite his lifetime with type 1 diabetes.

Born in Hull, East Yorkshire, I now live in the Forest of Dean, a beautiful area close to the border with Wales in Southwest England. We take daily walks in the trees surrounding our home.

Background and Experience

The house where I was born was torn down a few years later as it was in a slum district. The midwife attending my mother left her to it, certain I’d be dead due to Mum having an electric shock while scrubbing the floor as well as discovering my dying father in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor. When the same midwife later returned, my noise persuaded her the earlier diagnosis might have been wrong.

At five, I spent a few weeks in a local fever hospital, the only child among adults. My mother and her new partner, later my stepfather, were obliged to stand outside the windows and wish me a shouted Merry Christmas.

A reader from the age of three, I’d exhausted the local children’s library at age 11 and asked the fierce librarian if I could borrow from the adult section, normally available from age 14. Knowing me as a regular, she agreed. Extensive reading meant school was a bit of a bore and I couldn’t understand why I was fed information readily available in books. Major exams occurred around age 16, but my mother was killed in a car accident two days after my 16th birthday. No concessions…

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Stuart Aken
About Me Stories

Word-wrangler and storyteller. Photographer. Artist. Reader. Humanist, internationalist, secular, political, environmental. Blog http://stuartaken.net/