Stephen Raw (born London 1952) has lived in Manchester for the last thirty years. He has been a self-employed artist and designer since 1983 when he returned to Britain from teaching at the National Arts School in Papua New Guinea. Stephen’s work is varied: paintings, cover designs for Carcanet Press and commercial lettering for a variety of clients, including leading publishers, architects and design groups in the UK and Europe. ‘Fundamental to all my artwork’ Stephen says, ‘is a love of language and how that language is given a visual dimension through those arbitrary signs we call letters. Letters are images in themselves and, for me, that’s more than enough to be getting on with.’

He has exhibited widely: Italy, Germany, Ireland, Pakistan and the United States. A painting of his, Words by Nelson Mandela, is in the collection of the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin. All his book jacket/cover artwork, part of the Carcanet Press archive, is now kept by the John Rylands Research Institute, University of Manchester.

Stephen Raw did the cover for the P.Inman issue. Below is an example of his work, Imagination.