About

I was born and brought up in the south Wales industrial belt, in Pontardulais and Port Talbot. I spent much of my childhood bottling parazone and filling paraffin cans. I thought football could be a means of escape, but I didn't make the grade in schoolboy trials. 

So I headed up the A40 to Oxford instead, reading PPE at Balliol, then a Masters in demographic sociology at the London School of Economics, backed up a few years later with an M.Sc. at Surrey in social research methods. 

After leaving the LSE, I worked in two inner London neighbourhoods, and then taught at the National Institute for Social Work, before moving to the Community Development Foundation. I've also been a Council of Europe Fellow in Norway, and a visiting lecturer at a couple of European universities. 

I've been involved in the writing of a number of books on community development, including Skills in Neighbourhood Work, written with Paul Henderson, which is now in its fifth edition and sixth language.

I left CDF in the early 1990s and moved to west Wales, where I started to research and write about Dylan Thomas and his associations with both New Quay, Cardiganshire, and the Llansteffan peninsula in Carmarthenshire.

My books on Thomas include  A Farm, Two Mansions and a Bungalow and Fatal Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas?, as well as two volumes of Dylan Remembered, the edited transcripts of Colin Edwards' interviews with Dylan's family, friends, teachers and colleagues, all published by Seren. I've also written a novel, The Dylan Thomas Murders (Seren), as well as a walking guide, The Dylan Thomas Trail (Y Lolfa) 

I live in Powys with my wife, the poet Stevie Krayer, having previously lived in Llangadog, Ciliau Aeron and north London.