The Author
Writing historically grounded maritime fiction — stories that recover the women who led, endured, and were written out of the record.
Biography
History is not a shortage of remarkable women. It is a shortage of historians willing to look. For more than a decade, I have been looking — in the shipping ledgers of Plymouth and Brest, in the log books of the East India Company, in the testimony transcripts of admiralty courts where names appear once and then vanish entirely. The fiction I write is built on what those documents actually say.
My next novel, The Last Daughter of the Sea, begins with a different set of documents: the Linear B tablets of Knossos, where women appear by name, holding authority over grain, textiles and provisioning, and then stop appearing when the palaces fall. I am not interested in the mythology that replaced them. I am interested in who kept the records anyway.
The same principle governs every book I write. When a ship sails a particular course, that course is charted. When a character caulks a seam in a particular manner, that is how seams were caulked on that class of vessel in that decade. Specificity is not pedantry — it is respect for the people who actually lived these lives and were subsequently told, in a thousand polite ways, that their lives were not worth remembering.
I write in the morning, research in the afternoon, and on most evenings I am reading something published before 1850. I live near enough to the water that I can hear it when the wind is right. This is not incidental.
Writing Philosophy
“The sea does not care about your name or your gender or the century you were born in. It will kill you just the same. That indifference is clarifying. The women who went to sea — who navigated, who commanded, who survived — did so not because the ocean made an exception for them, but because the documentary record made one first, and then buried it. My work is exhumation.”
Historical Standards
Every novel carries a bibliography. This is not common in commercial fiction. It is deliberate.
Primary-source work conducted in person at the National Maritime Museum Greenwich, the Caird Library, and the Archives nationales de France — Marine series, Fonds anciens.
When documentary evidence conflicts with popular historical narrative, the documentary evidence governs. Anachronism is treated as structural failure, not stylistic latitude.
Each book is reviewed for anachronism by a specialist prior to submission. Readers who identify factual errors are thanked in subsequent printings by name.
Press & Media
The approved biography, the book, interview topics and the press contact are on the press page. Response time for media inquiries is typically 48 hours.
The Mariner’s Log
Irregular but unhurried — notes on primary sources, obscure historical figures, and the process of turning documented fact into readable fiction. No algorithm. No sponsorships.
