Biography

My two greatest passions have always been diving and archaeology, and my novels have their roots in many years of adventure in my own life. I was born in 1962 in Saskatoon, Canada, to English parents, both academic scientists. We returned to England and then went by sea to New Zealand, spending four years there before carrying on back to England in the same direction - so I’d circumnavigated the globe by the age of six. I spent much of the remainder of my childhood in Canada, where my first experiences of archaeological excavation were as a schoolboy on prehistoric and pioneer sites in Ontario. I was fascinated by the early history of the Americas, but yearned to return to Europe and immerse myself in the archaeology of the ancient world – and from 1980 I did so, studying for almost ten years at the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge. At Bristol I read Ancient Mediterranean Studies, graduating with a first-class honours degree, and I then took up a Research Scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where I completed a PhD in Archaeology. After holding a Research Fellowship at Cambridge I spent almost a decade teaching archaeology, ancient history and art history as a university lecturer in England, before giving up teaching to write fiction full-time.

I learned to dive in Canada at the age of 15 in 1977, qualifying with the Association of Canadian Underwater Councils and the Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques. Later I did advanced training with the British Sub-Aqua Club. My first open-water dive was on a shipwreck in Lake Huron in Ontario, and in the same year I dived for the first time under ice, in a cave and in a submerged mineshaft. Afterwards I dived extensively in British waters, and in 1981 joined my first underwater archaeology expedition to the Mediterranean, to excavate a Roman shipwreck off Sicily. Two years later I led my first expedition – the 1983 University of Bristol Sicily Expedition. Since then I’ve carried out numerous dives on ancient sites across the Mediterranean, from Italy and North Africa - where I led a Cambridge team to excavate submerged remains at Carthage - to the Aegean and the East Mediterranean. I took part in the only complete excavation of a Roman wreck in UK waters, off the Channel Islands. I dived for two seasons off Turkey on the first wreck to be fully excavated from the classical Greek period, while I was an adjunct professor of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. Along the way I’ve made many extraordinary discoveries, spanning more than ten thousand years of history: from prehistoric stone tools to exquisite ancient pottery to treasures of gold and bronze. Recently my diving has taken me to Australia, Hawaii and Mexico, and I’ve found myself drawn again to the challenging waters of the Great Lakes in Canada, and to diving under ice. I still find diving as thrilling as I did the first time I descended to a shipwreck as a schoolboy.

When I was growing up underwater archaeology was still in its infancy, and my heroes were the early pioneers of diving and marine archaeology – some of whom I was fortunate to dive with later on. At university, I was taught by scholars only a generation or two removed from the great pioneers of the late 19th and early 20th century, from men such as Heinrich Schliemann and Sir Arthur Evans. I’ve always felt close to that adventurous spirit of early archaeology. As an academic I enjoyed teaching wide-ranging courses, trying to infuse students with my passion for the past, and writing archaeological fiction represents a continuation of that passion. I grew up in a literary household surrounded by books, and have always written creatively. I began to see how I could use my experiences to write fiction with an underlying plausibility, and with the excitement that can only come from first-hand knowledge of what it’s like to be there, to experience real-life adventure and discovery and danger.

In addition to diving and excavation I’ve travelled widely. As a student I undertook a tour of ancient acropolis sites, ranging from Cumae in Italy – where I first saw the Cave of the Sibyl (featured in my novel The Last Gospel) – to the remote sites of ancient Crete, where I developed my fascination with the prehistoric Aegean (Atlantis, The Mask of Troy). A scholarship from the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara allowed me to spend months in eastern Turkey, when I first saw the eastern Black Sea shore (Atlantis). As a Winston Churchill Memorial Travelling Fellow I was in Jerusalem in the weeks preceding the First Gulf War, studying the archaeology of the Roman period (The Last Gospel). In recent years I’ve travelled to the Republic of Georgia, to Kyrgyzstan and the Lake of Issyk-Gul (The Tiger Warrior), to Greenland and the Canadian High Arctic (Crusader Gold), and to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.

I’m a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, as was my great-great-grandfather, a Royal Engineers colonel who administered Baluchistan under British rule; he was the basis for a fictional character in The Tiger Warrior. Other scholars in my background include the bestselling Oxford economic historian Henry de Beltgens Gibbins. My family includes many threads through colonial British history, and many wars – from the Napoleonic Wars to the Indian Mutiny to Afghanistan and the Boer War. One of my grandfathers fought in the First World War, and hearing his experiences led me to a fascination with the extremes of human endurance. My other grandfather was a merchant navy captain who sailed for more than forty years with the Clan Line, the last of the great East Indies shipping companies. He came from a long line of soldiers, sailors and merchants whose activities took them from the Americas to India to the Far East. My fictional protagonist Jack Howard often has his best insights through the eyes of those in the past he’s following, sometimes his own ancestors, and that reflects my own approach to history, seeing the past through the adventurers and explorers whose lives have fascinated me.

When I’m not on expeditions I divide my time between a farm and wilderness tract in Canada and a 16th century cottage beside a castle in England. My recreations include mountaineering - I’ve climbed in the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Caucasus, and the Andes, and often in Snowdonia in north Wales. I enjoy walking the hills and coasts of Britain, and wilderness canoeing and trekking in Canada, where I do most of my writing. Some other interests that figure in my novels include historic firearms, antiquarian books and maps, 18th century music, art history and philosophy. I love exploring new horizons with my eleven year old daughter, who had her first proper view of the underwater world through a diving mask when I was writing The Mask of Troy, off the coast of Wales in the Irish Sea.