About Leo Sofer

I discovered storytelling in 1989 aged 21. I began by performing stories in schools all over the south of England. After seven years and over two thousand performances something really unexpected happened: the stories started coming by themselves!

I have been telling those “intuitive” stories ever since. They arrive as a series of words and pictures inside and I never know what is coming next. I have found that things turn out best when I release control and allow the story go where it needs to go. I have learned to trust the wisdom and compassion that these stories contain, and my gratitude for this process deepens with each passing year. 

I became a father in 2005 and started telling stories to my son Luke when he was just two years old. He couldn’t follow everything but recognised the change in my voice and presence, and understood that something special was now happening between us.

By the time he was four he could follow every word and we embarked on a beautiful journey of a new bedtime story every evening (joined in time by his sister Lara, born two years after him).

I told my children one thousand intuitive stories over the following years. It was a precious period for us all.

There came a time, however, when I could feel my kids moving away from these sorts of stories and onto more complex narratives. It was a very special experience to tell these stories for my children and it is now an honour to share them with you and your family!

(If you would like to learn how to tell your own “intuitive” bedtime stories then check out my Training page here).

My wife Sundara created the illustrations and plays the music for many of the stories, so the whole family has been involved in creating Palace of Stories. Here we all are back in 2012.

About the stories

You’ll find here a few folk tales that I recorded and set to music back in the 1990s, but the bulk of the stories on this site are the ones that I told to my children at bedtime when they were young. Most were re-recorded in my recording studio, although in some cases the original recordings were so cute (with the children making funny comments in the background, or the atmosphere being so intimate and unrepeatable) that I included them as they were.

Nowadays I’m telling new stories, and performing them, with music from Sundara, for audiences of children and parents at The Dragon Sanctuary, the arts venue in Devon, England that we run. I’ll be adding these new recordings to Palace of Stories over the coming years. If you’d like to receive them for free, sign up for my newsletter!