Martin Stepek

Martin Stepek was born to a miner's daughter from an Irish background and a Polish father who was a refugee and seeker of asylum in Britain after multiple traumatic events in World War Two. Coming from tragic early lives and finding themselves in a poverty typical of the early post-war years they found success through starting their own business in 1949 repairing radios. Thus when Martin was born ten years later the family were wealthy. Growing up, education was held as a priority for all the Stepek children, and nursery rhymes, children's songs, and, later, poetry, were intrinsic parts of Martin's life. At secondary school in the 1970s Martin was fortunate to have a teacher who gave the pupils Scottish poetry to learn, including MacDiarmid and Edwin Morgan, alongside the likes of Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins. During his university years, Martin started to search more widely for poetry that he could connect with, including Neruda, Paz, Vallejo and Pessoa. He also found interest in the Dada and Surrealism movements and the political theories of anarchism. This coincided with the punk movement in music and the growth of fanzines. Martin started to write his own poems in the mid 1970s while still at school and has written since, but never considered sharing his poetry with anyone until a moment online changed his perspective. In the early 2000s, at the infancy of the internet, he joined Yahoo to try to connect with others who shared his Polish background, specifically the survivors - or their children - of the Soviet deportations of over a million Poles to various labour camps in the Gulag of the Soviet Union. He found an active group, all seeking answers to help explain the story their families all shared - life before the war, the deportations, life in the camps, release and the long search for refuge, and finally the post-war lives, mostly in exile. One day a member wrote a message saying they had confusing emotions about family members who died long before they were born, feelings they couldn't explain or express, but felt. Martin uncharacteristically replied saying that he had felt the same confusion but "wrote it out and it ends up looking something like poetry." In response he received around fifty requests to read these "poems" and Martin reluctantly shared some. The response was a huge surprise. People said they read and re-read the poems time after time. Several people said they cried reading them, and the person who wrote the original message said they now knew the feeling inside that they previous did not know how to express or describe. It was at that moment Martin discovered that his writings could have a positive effect on complete strangers, so from then on decided he would share his writings with others. As of 2025 he has published five volumes of poetry - one a collaboration with Polish-American poet, John Guzlowski - and a prose memoir of his late father's early life in Poland in the the Soviet labour camp. A mindfulness teacher, he has also written six volumes on that subject and was for a year and a half a weekly columnist on the subject in the Sunday Herald.