Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) was an English theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1979 to 2009 and author of the bestseller A Brief History of Time (1988).

Born in Oxford on 8 January 1942, Hawking read natural sciences at University College, Oxford, then moved to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1962 for doctoral research. Soon after his 21st birthday he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and given two years to live; he lived for more than five decades, later speaking through a speech-generating device. In 1974 he proposed that black holes emit radiation, now known as Hawking radiation. He held Cambridge's Lucasian chair for thirty years and founded the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in 2007. He died at home in Cambridge on 14 March 2018.

His popular books began with A Brief History of Time, published by Bantam in 1988. It spent a record 237 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list and has been translated into more than 40 languages. Later titles include Black Holes and Baby Universes (1993), The Universe in a Nutshell (2001), A Briefer History of Time (2005) and The Grand Design (2010), both with Leonard Mlodinow, and Brief Answers to the Big Questions, published in October 2018 after his death. Earlier, in 1973, he had published the technical work The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with George Ellis.

For collectors

The key book is the 1988 Bantam first edition of A Brief History of Time. With sales put at between 20 and 25 million copies, later printings are common, which is why collectors focus on the first printing. The Grand Design was published by Bantam in September 2010, in the US on the 7th and in the UK on the 9th, and Brief Answers to the Big Questions appeared seven months after his death.