Join us to hear two of the best contemporary writers of maritime fiction discussing the rich and exciting traditions of this ever-popular genre, and their approaches to it. Katie Daysh is an author from the Isle of Wight who loves to explore unheard voices in fiction. In her main genre, historical fiction, she enjoys placing queer characters at the heart of the narrative. Her stories are often set on the sea and illuminate themes of friendship, loyalty and mental health issues. Her debut novel, the Age of Sail adventure ‘Leeward’ was a Times historical novel of the year 2023, best-selling author Conn Iggulden described it as ‘An extraordinary work, absolutely breathtaking … it beggars belief’.

J. D. Davies is an historian and author. Born in in Llanelli on the coast of south-west Wales, a treacherous coast notorious for shipwrecks, the sea has always exerted a strong pull on his life and a fascination with warships and naval history can probably be dated to a family holiday in Portsmouth. He found that very little had been published about the seventeenth century navy since the 1920s, and that most of the books that did exist seemed to side unthinkingly with Samuel Pepys, accepting uncritically his opinions and evidence about the issues of the time. He has written factual books about the period and has now started a series of naval fiction also set in the time of Charles II and the Anglo-Dutch Wars.