Byron Rogers

Byron Davies Rogers (5 April 1942 – 3 August 2025) was a Welsh journalist, essayist, historian 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 then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said of the book: "Byron Rogers's lively and affectionate biography is unexpectedly, even riotously, funny." As a freelance feature writer for newspapers it was said that Rogers wrote with "magnificent flamboyance".

Life and career Rogers was born on 5 April 1942 near the south Wales village of Bancyfelin in Carmarthenshire. He spoke only Welsh to the age of five.

It has been written of his essays that he was "a historian of the quirky and forgotten, of people and places other journalists don't even know exist or ignore if they do". His literary debut, An Audience with an Elephant, published in 2001, was well received. and was described by Craig Brown in The Times as "the most enjoyable biography ever written".