Ambition

Stephen Maitland-Lewis is an award-winning author, a British attorney, and a former international investment banker. He has held senior executive positions in London, Kuwait, Paris, Munich, and on Wall Street prior to moving to California in 1991. He has owned a luxury hotel and a world-renowned restaurant and was also Director of Marketing of a Los Angeles daily newspaper. Maitland-Lewis is a jazz aficionado and a Board Trustee of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in New York. In 2014, he received the Museum's prestigious Louie Award. A member of PEN, The Authors Guild, and The Dramatists Guild of America, Maitland-Lewis is also on the Executive Committee of the International Mystery Writers Festival. In addition, he is on the Advisory Board of the California Jazz Foundation and is a former Board member. He has published short stories in various magazines and the recently published, Mr. Simpson and Other Short Stories, is Maitland-Lewis' first collection of short stories. In addition to Duped, his novels include Hero on Three Continents; Emeralds Never Fade which won the 2012 Benjamin Franklin Award for Historical Fiction and the 2011 Written Arts Award for Best Fiction; Ambition which was a 2013 USA Best Book Awards finalist and won first place for General Fiction in the 2013 Rebecca's Reads Choice Awards; and Botticelli's Bastard, a 2014 USA Best Book Awards finalist in three categories and winner of the Bronze Award in Best Regional Fiction (Europe) at the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Maitland-Lewis' short story, Mr. Simpson, has recently been developed as a play and has been performed by noted theatre companies in Miami, New Orleans, and Beverly Hills. In January of 2016, Maitland-Lewis was sworn in as a Freeman of the City of London and admitted as a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of City Solicitors. In April of 2016, he became a Fellow of The Royal Geographical Society (FRGS). He divides his time between Beverly Hills, California, and New Orleans, Louisiana.