Stephen Benatar was born in 1937 in London. He studied at King's College in that city and graduated in Teaching at Sittingbourne College. He has lived in Southern California, has been an English teacher in France, an umbrella salesman and hotel porter. He did not publish his first book, The Man on the Bridge, until he turned forty-four. Her second novel, Rachel Waring's Dream Life, vaguely inspired by Joseph L. Mankiewicz's film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, was a finalist for the James Tait Memorial Prize and is considered her most accomplished work, although in its first edition, it appeared on the prestigious The Bodley Head label, he sold few copies. In 2007 he tried to be reissued, but the project was rejected by 36 publishers, despite the praise prologue by John Carey, in which he claimed that it was one of the most important novels in the British narrative of the latter part of the twentieth. Stephen Benatar decided to self-publish the novel, until one day, by chance, after a presentation of a book ran into a man who asked him to read the work. It was Edwin Franks, editor of The New York Review of Books. Franks would declare that the novel was read in one go and that he was left in shock. After this edition, the dream life of Rachel Waring happened to be a cult classic. Stephen Benatar has four children and currently lives in West Hampstead, London, with his partner, graphic designer John F. Murphy.