Steven Phillips
Historian, genealogist, and storyteller — drawn to the lives that the official record almost forgot.
About Steven Phillips
Steven Phillips is the author of the Blood of the Crossing saga, a historical fiction series set across seventeenth-century Wales, the Atlantic, and colonial Virginia. His writing is rooted in years of genealogical research into Welsh and early American migration, and in a deep fascination with the ordinary people whose lives shaped history from below.
Before writing fiction, Steven spent decades tracing family lines through parish registers, court records, ship manifests, and land grants — the same documents that appear, transformed, in the world of Rhys and Meg. That research gave him not only a detailed picture of the period, but a profound respect for the men and women who crossed oceans with almost nothing and built lives in a world that offered them very little.
The Crossing, Book One of the Blood of the Crossing saga, is his debut novel. He is currently at work on Book Two.
Where History Meets Story
The Blood of the Crossing series grew directly out of genealogical research. Tracing Welsh family lines into the early colonial period, Steven kept encountering the same pattern: names that appeared in Welsh parish records, then vanished — only to reappear, changed and anglicised, in Virginia land grants and headright lists decades later.
Those gaps in the record — the crossings that left almost no trace — became the imaginative space the series inhabits. Who were these people? What did they carry? What did they lose? What did they find? The historical record tells us where they ended up. Fiction asks what it cost them to get there.
Steven is particularly interested in the intersection of Welsh identity, English legal systems, and early American land ownership — and in the ways that written records both preserved and erased the lives of ordinary people. That interest runs through every page of the series.
Why This Story
The Blood of the Crossing saga is, at its heart, a story about what people carry across water — and what they are forced to leave behind. It is about land and belonging, about the violence of enclosure and colonisation, and about the stubborn persistence of identity in the face of systems designed to erase it.
Steven chose to centre the series on Welsh characters because Welsh voices are largely absent from the popular narrative of early American colonisation — despite the fact that Welsh men and women were present at Jamestown from the beginning, and despite the profound impact that English legal and economic pressure had on Welsh communities in the early seventeenth century.
The series is planned as a multi-generational saga, following the descendants of Rhys and Meg across the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth — as Virginia changes, as the colony becomes a country, and as the consequences of those first crossings ripple forward through time.
Connect with Steven
Follow along for historical research notes, writing updates, genealogy finds, and news about the series.
Begin the journey.
The Crossing — Book One of the Blood of the Crossing series — available now in hardcover, paperback, and ebook.