In September 2025, Stephen Walker returned to Belfast to launch David Trimble: Peacemaker, the second half of a project he had built over several years: a biography of the Ulster Unionist leader to stand alongside the one he had already written about John Hume, the SDLP leader with whom Trimble shared the Good Friday Agreement's Nobel Peace Prize. Walker, the BBC Northern Ireland journalist who had covered that same peace process as it happened, died at his home on September 6, 2026, surrounded by loved ones, according to his friend and former BBC colleague Mark Carruthers, who announced the news at the family's request, The Irish News reported. He was 61.

Walker was born in England and raised in Ballymena, County Antrim. He studied at Northampton and took a postgraduate diploma in broadcast journalism in Portsmouth, then began his career in 1989 as a reporter for BBC Radio Leeds.

He joined BBC Northern Ireland in 1991, reporting for Radio Ulster programmes including Good Morning Ulster before moving into television in 1993. In May 1994 he joined the Spotlight investigative documentary strand, according to Stephen Walker's website. His documentary The Black Catch won a European Journalism Award in 1995, and his investigation into the killing of an IRA quartermaster brought a Royal Television Society award in 2001, Sunday Guardian Live reported.

Walker went on to serve as the BBC's Westminster correspondent and later as its Northern Ireland political correspondent, reporting on the final years of the Troubles, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and Brexit, and interviewing five serving prime ministers over the course of his career. He was named Northern Ireland Journalist of the Year in the mid-2000s. Colleagues credited him with a gift for making complicated stories clear. BBC Northern Ireland's director, Adam Smyth, said Walker had a talent for simplifying the complex so that viewers, listeners and readers came away with a better understanding of the politics of Westminster, Belfast and Dublin.

Walker began writing books alongside his broadcasting. Forgotten Soldiers: The Irishmen Shot at Dawn, his 2007 debut, told the story of 28 Irish soldiers executed by the British Army during the First World War and became an Irish Times bestseller. Hide and Seek, published in 2011, followed an Irish priest who sheltered Allied escapees in Nazi-occupied Rome and his conflict with an SS officer; it was published by HarperCollins and named a Daily Mail Book of the Week. In 2015 he published Ireland's Call, chronicling Irish footballers, rugby players, cricketers and GAA stars who died in the Great War. He left the BBC in 2023, after 34 years in broadcasting, to concentrate on writing.

That same year he published John Hume: The Persuader, a biography of the Nobel Peace Prize winning SDLP leader and Good Friday Agreement architect. Two years later came David Trimble: Peacemaker, drawing on interviews with dozens of sources, including former British prime minister Tony Blair, to trace Trimble's path from a reserved Belfast academic to Stormont's first First Minister. A review in The Irish Times called it "a journalist's biography rather than a historian's," built to give "a textured, human portrayal" of its subject, the same quality that had marked Walker's own three decades of reporting on Northern Ireland's peace process.

News of Walker's death brought tributes from across Northern Ireland's political divide. SDLP leader Claire Hanna called him "an outstanding journalist and writer" who had "chronicled some of the most significant chapters in our recent history with intelligence, curiosity and great humanity." First Minister Michelle O'Neill described him simply as "a real gentleman," while DUP leader Gavin Robinson called him a "highly respected journalist" and Alliance minister Naomi Long said he would be sorely missed. Mike Nesbitt, the former Ulster Unionist leader who had himself worked as a broadcaster, said he was saddened to the core. Carruthers, who announced the death, said Walker "was a wonderful husband, father, brother and son, a fine journalist and author, and the very best of friends."

Away from journalism, Walker was a devoted supporter of his hometown football club, Ballymena United. He is survived by his wife, Katrin, their daughter, Grace, and their sons, Gabriel and Jack.

What Walker leaves is a working record of Northern Ireland's passage out of conflict, told twice over: once in the nightly Spotlight reports and political dispatches he filed as it happened, and again in the two biographies that took the peace process's central figures' full measure afterward. Forgotten Soldiers, Hide and Seek and Ireland's Call remain on shelves as evidence of a curiosity that reached well past his own patch. John Hume: The Persuader and David Trimble: Peacemaker, published within two years of each other and finished barely a year before his death, stand together as the fullest account yet written of the two men who signed Northern Ireland's peace.