Nigel Jenkins
I was born on a farm in Gower in 1949, and although I knew from my adolescence that I wanted to be a writer, I never imagined that I would one day edit an encyclopaedia. My writing life started as a newspaper reporter in the English Midlands and, then, after a year of odd-jobbing and mooching around Europe and North Africa, I went to Essex University to study literature and film, carving out time, every day, to work on my poems (I've published half a dozen or so books of poems, the latest being a collection of haiku, O For a Gun (2007)). I then came back to Gower to work as a freelance writer and lecturer.
It was, perhaps, my winning of the Wales Book of the Year award in 1996, with a book about Welsh missionaries in north-east India, Gwalia in Khasia (1995), that led to my being invited to co-edit The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales. This seemed, at the time, an enormous and alarming responsibility, but I was assured it would be a part-time job, and it could surely take no more than two or three years. So, encouraged by this, and by the prospect of working with such inspiring and congenial collaborators, I said 'yes'.
Little did we realize how this project would take over our lives for the best part of ten years. About the only writing of my own I had time for was the composition of haiku – on the twenty-minutes bike ride between my home in Mumbles and the University of Wales Swansea (which kindly gave the project an office and later took me on to teach creative writing).
But whatever sacrifices we have all had to make, it's been worthwhile: we believe that we have produced a book which, for the first time, defines Wales, and a book that will make itself useful to Wales for years to come.
