David Gibbins is one of the world's foremost maritime archaeologists as well as being a Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author. His thirteen novels so far have sold over two million copies and are published in thirty languages. He was born in Canada and brought up there, in New Zealand and in England. He has a first-class honours BA in Ancient Mediterranean Studies from the University of Bristol and a PhD in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Research Scholar of Corpus Christi College and a postdoctoral fellow. After several years teaching archaeology, ancient history and art history as a university lecturer in the UK he was a Visiting Scholar at St John's College, Oxford and an Adjunct Professor of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. His many publications as an academic include popular articles in Antiquity , the Illustrated London News and New Scientist . As a full-time writer he developed his 'Jack Howard' series of novels, thrillers based on his own experiences as an underwater archaeologist, and he has also published novels of historical fiction. He has investigated numerous shipwrecks ranging in date from early prehistory to modern times, including Greek and Roman wrecks in the Mediterranean, wrecks in North American waters and seventeenth-century treasure wrecks off Cornwall in England.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellow.