My book A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks reflects my lifelong fascination with underwater archaeology and maritime history. I've also written 13 novels, including eleven in my Jack Howard series of archaeological thrillers and two historical novels set in the Roman period. My books have sold over three million copies and been published in thirty languages. Much of my writing is based on my own experiences as an archaeologist and diver. I learned to dive in Canada aged 15 and had dived under ice, in flooded mines and on shipwrecks before I had left school. As an undergraduate at the University of Bristol in England I spent my summers excavating Roman shipwrecks off Sicily, and I continued that as a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. After holding a Research Scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a postdoctoral fellowship, I taught archaeology and ancient history as a university lecturer in England. Along the way I excavated more wrecks and at the ancient site of Carthage in Tunisia, held a Visiting Scholarship at St John’s College, Oxford and was an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Nautical Archaeology while diving on an ancient Greek wreck off Turkey. After leaving academia to write full-time I dived with my brother and daughter on wrecks in the Great Lakes in Canada, and then on wrecks off Cornwall in south-west England of the 17th and 18th centuries. Many of these sites feature in my novels and in A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks. I've been surrounded by books all my life, and love the fact that research for my writing has given me an excuse to read widely in areas beyond my original areas of expertise. In fiction, I had an early fascination with Tolkien and a long-standing passion for existentialist and magical realist literature, and more recently I've been devoted to Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey series of novels set at sea during the Napoleonic Wars - among the greatest historical novels ever written. I wish I had time to read more fiction but I find when writing my own books that I'm immersed completely in that, and there are many more of those to come!
