Stephen. L. West (writing as Stephen J Bannister) was born in the UK but moved to South Australia in the mid-sixties growing up mainly in the north-eastern suburbs of Adelaide. At seventeen he enlisted in the Royal Australian Navy where he learnt his trade. Whilst still serving, he married Trudi in nineteen eighty. After a ten-year career he joined the New South Wales Fire Brigades before the family, now four with two children, decided to move back to South Australia.

His writing career stared in the late nineteen-eighties creating technical manuals which soon led to looking further afield and dabbling in fiction. As an amateur astronomer with a lot of interest in other sciences, he decided to write his first science fiction novel.

'I had this thing going around and around inside my head so I decided one day to get it out of there and onto paper.'

Stephen and Trudi still live in South Australia, in the mid-north and are both involved with the Country Fire Service, Stephen as a firefighter and Trudi as a financial coordinator. Their family has expanded to six grandchildren (with more to come).