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Stephen Bourne

College positions:
Emeritus Fellow
Subject:
Business Management, Publishing
Department/institution:
Cambridge University Press, Ely Cathedral, Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales

Stephen R. R. Bourne

For the first 21 years of his life Stephen lived in Uganda, Tanganyika and Kenya. An MA in French and German came from Scotland and he taught English for a year in France. England provided him with a chartered accountancy qualification, which he took with him to Hong Kong, where he worked for 11 years, in tax, petrochemicals and financial newswires.

Returning to Europe in 1988, he was responsible for the newswire businesses in the Nordic countries, Benelux, Ireland and the UK. Stephen then went on to manage the financial printing division of the St Ives printing group, before joining the board of Cambridge University Press, where he moved the business away from printing, focusing instead on building the Press’s presence overseas, notably in China and India.

Given the above, it is unsurprising that Stephen describes himself as a ‘committed internationalist’ and that he was delighted to be elected a Fellow of the most international of Cambridge’s colleges, Clare Hall. Much more surprising was that, following his retirement from CUP, he spent the next 7 years managing the businesses and staff of Ely Cathedral.

Now in his second retirement, Stephen is active with charities in Newmarket, working to build a sense of community among the 16 groups who live in his home town. Stephen’s wife, Stephanie, worked as an Officer in the Hong Kong Government, and they have two children. His principal cultural interests in recent years have been the Britten Sinfonia, the Bury St Edmunds Theatre Royal and The Wine Society. From the latter stems his passion for the world’s wines. And then there’s West Ham United, of which he has been a fan for almost 60 years.

Select publications

  • Ten Chapters on Publishing: Cross-Cultural and Beyond, Wu Wei and Stephen Bourne, Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, Beijing 978-7-5135-2355-4 (2012). This title, in English and Chinese, features a selection of parallel articles published by the two authors in three professional magazines in China.

Select awards

  • The Prince of Wales’ Ambassador for the East of England, Business in the Community, 2009
  • The China Special Book Award, 2011