Kevin Bowyer was born in Essex, England, in 1961 and studied with Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, David Sanger, and Virginia Black.
He won first prizes in five international organ competitions (St Albans in 1983, and Paisley, Odense, Dublin, and Calgary all in 1990) and had early success in recording, turning out more than 100 solo CDs in a career spanning forty years, including the complete organ works of J S Bach, Brahms, Alain, and much contemporary repertoire: Brian Ferneyhough, Peter Maxwell Davies, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Jonathan Harvey, Malcolm Williamson, Alan Gibbs, Gordon Sherwood, Charles Camilleri, and many more. He gained a reputation for playing “impossible” music, most notably that of Kaikhosru Sorabji, whose eight-hour Second Symphony for Organ (1929-32) he performed in Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie in 2019.
He played in many parts of the world and was for nine years (1999-2008) Senior Lecturer in Organ at the Royal Northern College of Music.
In 2022, he was awarded the Medal of the Royal College of Organists, the institution’s highest honour, and in 2023, the “Lifetime Award” of the German Record Critics – the “Ehrenpreis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik”.
Kevin has been Organist to the University of Glasgow since 2005.
He is the author of seven volumes of fiction: The House on Boulby Cliff, In the Silence of Time (2 vols.), Close to the Silence, Babylon House, Cadmun Gale, and Splinters of Silence.