Stephen Rea was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1969, the same year The Troubles started. At 17, after a UK-wide search with more than 600 applicants, he was chosen to be the first-ever trainee for The Sun, the highest-selling, English-language daily newspaper in the world. His journalism career took him all over England, then he returned to Ulster and bought a travel agency. He spent 12 years traveling the world, visiting more than 100 countries, the 50 US States, and all seven continents.
In 2004, he moved to New Orleans, and a year later while evacuated from Hurricane Katrina, he started Finn McCool’s Football Club, a memoir about his experiences before, during, and after the storm. He was then asked to teach a fiction-writing class for the Walker Percy Center at Loyola University, and now teaches his own courses. His second book World Cup Fever about the international soccer tournament was published in 2018.
He has written for Chelsea Football Club, the National World War II Museum, and newspapers, magazines and websites, both domestically and internationally. He spent the pandemic lockdown working on his latest book Ozzy & Me, released in November 2025 by Simon and Schuster on both sides of the Atlantic.
