Swansea-born Tom Stevens grew up in wartime and as a teenager joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers. His service with the Royal Welch in the West Indies forms the substance of his candid and engaging memoir, A Welch Calypso. Back in Wales he married Kaye and they had three children, Adrian, Jonathan and Lesley-Anne, migrating to Australia in 1965. While running a shop in the small New South Wales township of Gerogery, Tom became an artist, painting landscapes and scenes from his childhood. Tom and Kaye moved to Canberra, where in the mid-1990s Tom became blind. He now lives in a residential home in Canberra.
