It’s all about the place. My compulsion to explore, to dig deep into the layers of history and identity, began as a squit of a lad in the Midlands of the 1970s. By the age of six, I was collecting maps. By twelve, I was wandering the country on rail rover tickets and navigating myself to my mum’s in France.

When it came to earning a living, I lasted just two years in proper jobs. My first two books came out when I was 24, and there has been a steady stream since then. For a decade, it was all guide books; my own series, plus titles for the Rough Guides and Gay Men’s Press. Loved the travelling and the exploring, loathed the nitpicky details, price codes, star ratings, formulaic straitjacket and bewildering feedback from readers.

For a few years, I wrote and performed one-man stand-up shows about different places and their alternative histories: one, in Walsall, was picketed noisily by the local branch of fascist blockheads Combat 18, who’d decided, on the strength of the flier, that I was a threat to the moral purity of their town. I trotted around the stand-up circuit too and became the regular compère in a couple of Birmingham comedy clubs.

In 2000, I moved to mid Wales, learned Welsh and went bald (the facts may be related). For seven years, I wrote and presented offbeat travelogues for ITV Wales and started to write the books that I’d always wanted to. Wales had fascinated me from an early age. Growing up with the ‘blue remember’d hills’ of the Marches as my western horizon, it had always exerted a pull on my imagination, and I’ve been thrilled to put down roots there.

My books start with place, and mix in memoir, history, identity, politics and belonging. They include the bestselling Map Addict, its popular follow-up The Wild Rover, the cult Neighbours From Hell? and The Greasy Poll, a political diary of the 2015 general election, when I came three thousand votes short of becoming the Plaid Cymru MP for Ceredigion .

For the past few years, I have been working on a loose trilogy. Two books have so far been published: On the Red Hill (2019), an evocation of the queer rural, won the 2020 non-fiction Wales Book of the Year, and was runner-up for the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing. Next was All the Wide Border (2023), an examination of the England-Wales frontier as a line on the map, a line through history and a line in our heads. It was named by Waterstones as one of the ten best travel books of the year. Mid-Land, the final book of the three, will be published in late 2026.

“He’s gay! He’s liberal! He’s borderline pagan! He’s even sort of Welsh!” – Daily Mail

“An historical aside from Mike Parker is worth a monograph from others” – New Welsh Review

“Parker proves a witty and engaging guide” – The Guardian

“What a true wanderer he is, and how wonderfully well-read, and how truly sensitive to numen!” – Jan Morris

“A kind of mini-biography of the British psyche emerges from Parker’s work, its learning lightly worn and its tales well told, full of interest and incident.” – Horatio Clare