David Gibbins - Biography

Biography

He was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, to English parents who were both academic scientists. He travelled around the world with them by sea as a boy, including four years living in New Zealand, before returning to Canada. He attended the University of Bristol, England, where he was awarded a First Class Honours Degree in Ancient Mediterranean Studies. He then went to Cambridge University as a Research Scholar of Corpus Christi College, where he completed a PhD in Archaeology in 1990.

Gibbins learned to scuba dive at the age of 15 in Canada, and dived under ice, on shipwrecks and in caves while he was still at school. He has led numerous underwater archaeology expeditions around the world, including five seasons excavating ancient Roman shipwrecks off Sicily and a survey of the submerged harbour of ancient Carthage. In 1999-2000 he was part of an international team excavating a 5th century BC shipwreck off Turkey. His many publications on ancient shipwreck sites have appeared in scientific journals, books and popular magazines. Most recently his fieldwork has taken him to the Arctic Ocean, to Mesoamerica and to the Great Lakes in Canada.

After holding a Research Fellowship at Cambridge, he spent most of the 1990s as a Lecturer in the School of Archaeology, Classics and Oriental Studies at the University of Liverpool. On leaving teaching he become a novelist, writing archaeological thrillers derived from his own background. His novels have sold over two million copies and have been London Sunday Times and New York Times bestsellers. His first novel, Atlantis, published in the UK in 2005 and the US in September 2006, has been published in 30 languages and is being made into a TV miniseries; since then he has written five further novels, published in more than 100 editions internationally. His novels form a series based on the fictional maritime archaeologist Jack Howard and his team, and are contemporary thrillers involving a plausible archaeological backdrop.

Among his awards Gibbins has held a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship.

He divides his time between fieldwork, a farm in Canada where he writes, and England. He has a daughter, whose mother is the philosopher and broadcaster Angie Hobbs. He is related to the 19th century historian Henry de Beltgens Gibbins and is great great nephew of Brigadier Henry John Gordon Gale, DSO and Bar.