Ambassador of Nowhere: A Latin American Pilgrimage (2024)

In Ambassador of Nowhere, Richard Gwyn takes the reader on a series of journeys across Latin America, in search of poems for his landmark anthology, The Other Tiger. He is driven through lunar landscapes in Patagonia, walks in the temperate rainforests of southern Chile and travels to a town on the Rio Magdalena that may or may not exist. From the betrayal of revolution in Nicaragua to the victims of guerrilla war in Colombia and the threat of narco gang violence in Mexico, Gwyn’s lyrical, life-affirming account pays homage to a deeply conflicted and paradoxical continent and its writers. Ambassador of Nowhere is also a book about translation, and the multiple representations of reality that the act of translation sets in motion, even as the author struggles to keep his own life on track when confronted by the demons of an earlier existence.

Praise for Ambassador of Nowhere:

Richard Gwyn journeys through the literature and landscapes of Latin America with the attentive gaze of someone on the lookout for the unexpected, and the conspiratorial air of one who makes close friends of perfect strangers. The ‘Ambassador of Nowhere’ deals in equal measure with poets and beggars, demystifies the colonial gaze of famous authors, and delves into the mysteries of Spanish with the wisdom of an interpreter of dreams. An existential pilgrim, Gwyn explores himself, too, and ends his Odyssey at his place of origin, by his father’s side. The paradox of this solitary adventure is that its author becomes the best of travelling companions. Juan Villoro

Richard Gwyn is a keen explorer of Latin American maps, as attentive to small anecdotes as he is to the larger conflicts that define a society. His way of joining up poetry, political critique and autobiographical narrative is no less remarkable than his ability to make links between countries with very different traditions . . . To accompany this empathetic traveller, tragicomic chronicler and passionate scholar of an entire continent is a rare pleasure, as well as a beautiful demonstration that we only ever belong to a place if we keep our eyes open. Andrés Neuman 

A wonderfully rich and immersive tour through the lands and literatures of Latin America, but very much more than that. Gwyn explores translation and alcoholism, history, mortality and Welsh identity with the same acute and generous eye. Tom Bullough

With his customary ranging intelligence and elegance of prose Richard Gwyn here presents the rewarding and probing life of the peregrinating writer, flying back and fore between Wales and Latin America much like the migrations of Manx shearwater, which similarly bridges continents with ease. A series of informative, revealing and meditative journals – with poetry set very much at the heart – they remind us how Gwyn is one of the most companionable of writers and most perceptive of cultural guides. Jon Gower

The Vagabond’s Breakfast (2011) 

In 2006, Richard Gwyn was given a year to live unless a suitable liver donor were found. A novelist and poet, he lost nine years of his life to vagrancy and addiction around the Mediterranean, principally Spain and Crete. This memoir is an account of his “lost” years of reckless travel and serial hospitalizations; redemption via friendship, imagination, love and fatherhood; recovery; living under sentence of death, and the life-saving gift of a hepatic graft.

The Vagabond’s Breakfast won Wales Book of the Year for Creative Nonfiction in 2012.

‘Richard Gwyn began The Vagabond’s Breakfast while recovering from a liver transplant. A memoir of the nine years of drink, drugs and vagrancy that did for his first liver, it’s a jagged tale gracefully told. Full of humane surreality, there’s something whole, even holistic, about the brokenness of the life it pieces (back) together. Like many books about illness, it’s also about health: Gwyn is a citizen of both realms, describing life with ‘two passports.”   Patrick McGuinness in TLS Books of the Year.

‘An enthralling memoir of a young man going deeply and terribly astray.’   Tessa Hadley in the London Review of Books.

‘A bloody marvellous piece of work.’   Lindsay Clarke, author of The Chymical Wedding and The Water Theatre.

‘Spicy and compelling mix of memoir and philosophy . . . a coherent and stylishly literate account  . . . a book to remember.’     Steve Dube, The Western Mail

‘Brutally honest, poetic and sometimes funny account . . . brave, original and strangely compelling.’   Morning Star

‘Best book I have read so far this year. On a par with Hilary Mantel or Joan Didion. Utterly terrifying, funny, thought provoking and seemingly without an ounce of self-pity. A masterpiece.’      Scott Pack.

‘Impactante . . . un ensayo tan íntimo y certero como On being Ill de Virginia Woolf . . .  Al terminar el desayuno con Gwyn, el lector tiene la sensación de hallarse en el Grado Cero de la salud, a un paso del reino vecino, aterrado y aliviado al mismo tiempo.’ [‘Stunning… and as intimate and accurate as Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill. On finishing breakfast with Gwyn, the reader is left with the sensation of finding himself at health’s Absolute Zero, one step from the neighbouring kingdom, terrified and relieved at the same time.’]  Andrés Neuman in Clarín (Argentina).

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