Roger D. Taylor

Roger Taylor was born by the sea, of sea-faring stock, and has been sailing for well over sixty years. As a young seaman he was shipwrecked on a remote New Zealand shore aboard the square-rigger Endeavour II. He then built the 19' Roc and twice crossed the Tasman Sea in her, at the time the smallest yacht ever to have sailed from New Zealand to Australia. More recently, he forged a unique sailing partnership with his 21' junk-rigged yacht Mingming, using her to develop his ideas on simple, harmonious voyaging. In January 2010 Taylor was awarded the Jester Medal by the Ocean Cruising Club for 'an outstanding contribution to the art of single-handed sailing'.

Taylor has written five books covering ten of his many ocean voyages. His books have been published in Russian and French. In April 2013 the French edition of Mingming & the Art of Minimal Ocean Sailing won the Prix Henri-Queffelec. The same book was a finalist for the Prix Gens de Mer in 2014. The French edition of Taylor's third book Mingming & the Tonic of Wildness was winner of the Prix Albatros for the best sea-going narrative of 2015.

Having sailed to 80 Degrees North to the north-west of Spitsbergen in Mingming in 2011, Taylor followed that up in 2014 by sailing to 79 Degrees North, to the north-east of the Svalbard group, in his Achilles 24 Mingming II. In January 2015 he was awarded the Royal Cruising Club's Medal for Seamanship, for 'exploits of legendary proportions'.

In 2018 Taylor sailed Mingming II to 81 Degrees North and beyond, passing to the north of the Svalbard group and then east to the north-west coast of Franz Josef Land. This voyage, in waters which are usually icebound, took him into the little known and virtually never sailed Queen Victoria Sea. That voyage forms the basis for his fifth sailing book Mingming II & the Impossible Voyage.

In his recent book Travels Through a Window - Taylor stays ashore and embarks on a different but equally fascinating kind of voyage, spending a year observing the sea and mountains visible from his lochside home in the Scottish Highlands.

Taylor's latest work - The Untold Voyage - is due for release in early 2025.

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Taylor is also active as a translator of maritime literature from both French and Russian. His most recent and most ambitious project has been the translation from French of Eric Gautier's extraordinary two-volume historical novel, almost 1000 pages in total, following the fortunes of a young French Naval officer, Pierre-Marie Laforest-Dombourg, during the eighteenth century naval conflicts between France and England. The two volumes of The Adventures of Laforest-Dombourg are now available in both paperback amd Kindle form.