David Gibbins

Early life

Gibbins was born in 1962 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, to British 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 England and 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.

Academic career

After holding a Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, he spent most of the 1990s as a Lecturer in the School of Archaeology, Classics and Oriental Studies at the University of Liverpool before devoting himself full-time to writing and fieldwork.

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, when he was an Adjunct Professor of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. 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, to the Great Lakes in Canada and to the waters off south-west England.

In 2016 he and his diving team off Cornwall in England rediscovered the wreck of the Schiedam, a ship involved in the evacuation of English Tangier in 1684 and associated with Samuel Pepys. The discovery was widely reported in the media, including the BBC.

Writing

On leaving academia he became a novelist, writing archaeological thrillers derived from his own background. His novels have sold over three 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; since then he has written ten further novels, published in more than 200 editions internationally. His main series is based on the fictional maritime archaeologist Jack Howard and his team, and forms contemporary thrillers involving a plausible archaeological backdrop. He has also written two historical novels set in ancient Rome.

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 descended from 17th century Massachusetts Puritan Reformist John Cotton, 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.

Honours

Among his awards Gibbins is a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellow, for which he received the Churchill Medallion of the Trust. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.