Three Journeys

by Byron Rogers

Three Journeys is part reminiscence, part gazeteer, part portrait gallery, and turns on Byron Rogers's experiences of growing up in, and leaving, Wales. The first journey is into his family's old unchanged Welsh-speaking countryside, whilst the second takes him into the old English-speaking garrison town where he was brought up and where he continues to find the wittiest, and the strangest, people I have ever known. The third is a journey into exile, itself part of the Welsh experience, and into that increasing, even obsessive, interest in the past which exile prompts, a past which is only a fingernail away. With archaeological zeal, each journey unearths snippets, stories and histories that have long been hidden away, forgotten or ignored, some comic, some fantastical, and some genuinely poignant.

218 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2011

About the author

Byron Rogers is a Welsh journalist, essayist and biographer. In August, 2007 the University of Edinburgh awarded him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the best biography published in the previous year, for The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of RS Thomas. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said of the book: "Byron Rogers's lively and affectionate biography is unexpectedly, even riotously, funny."

Born and raised in Carmarthen, he now lives in Northamptonshire. He has written for Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian, and was once speech writer for the Prince of Wales. It has been written of his essays that he is "a historian of the quirky and forgotten, of people and places other journalists don't even know exist or ignore if they do".