This week marks the anniversary of the birth of that most prolific writer Robert Louis Stevenson. We have no less than six of his works read as unabridged audio books in the Silksoundbooks collection.

Stevenson was born in Edinburgh into a prestigious family of lighthouse designers and engineers on his father’s side and moral philosophers on his mother’s. His mother’s legacy to the young Stevenson was rather more damaging however in that he inherited her weak lungs which dominated his short life until his death forty-four years later.

Stevenson did not begin writing seriously until he was twenty-five after he had acquired a legal qualification, at his family’s insistence. Maybe through the stress of completing a legal degree under duress, his health was however seriously failing and Stevenson was sent abroad to seek warmer climates.

He travelled to France where he felt an immediate affinity with the more easy going Southern culture, changing his name from Lewis to Louis following the French spelling and it was here that he wrote the bulk of his best work - well known novels such as Treasure Island read by the highly acclaimed English actor Timothy West , and Kidnapped read by star performer Nicholas Rowe. The great Alan Howard reads The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the Stevenson short stories - Markheim, A Lodging for the Night and The Pavilion on the Links.

Robert Louis Stevenson died in 1894. A memorial in Edinburgh stands in West Princes Street Gardens below Edinburgh Castle; it is a simple upright stone inscribed with 'RLS - A Man of Letters 1850 -1894'