It has been a long-time wish of mine to write about the sea. But I didn’t want the next YA, with generic themes and stereotypical-personality-and-stunning-visuals type of characters. I wanted to create a story that was personal, with characters who are close to my heart and who I know will resonate with others the same strong way it does with me. And so came the idea for The Sea Whisperer.

I was born in an Eastern European coastal town at the Black Sea, and wandering the beaches barefooted and climbing rocks long after sunset is not unfamiliar to me. Surely, no man who has ever seen and felt the fearsome might and vast beauty of the sea can ever love any other natural phenomenon as much. At least that was the case with me, ever since I was a child. The taste of the sea was constantly on my tongue, the stone-cracking zenith heat of the sun on my skin, and the briny scent of dried seaweed in my nostrils. (And yes, roasted mussels are not just my main character’s favourite, they’re also my favourite.) But it was not just during the summer. I was on those shores every season.

I was blessed once, for having been so close to the sea in my childhood, and twice, because in 2019 I was accepted at a university in another coastal town, in the far windswept northeastern UK, and thus never had to part with the sea. And oh, the North Sea is so fierce and dark that they had to build solid sea wall defences to contain it. Even half of the wooden groynes the waves destroyed last winter.

Everything around me is history here. Below my apartment is a 220-year-old pub whose regular customers sometimes sing drunken songs, but I don’t usually mind. The singing is as much part of the town as are the old buildings and cobblestone streets. None of it helps ground you much in reality, really. I am well-aware there is something peculiarly timeless in the landscapes and coasts of Scotland, and everyone who has laid eyes on this country can feel that this ethereal quality has permeated everything. But here at the peninsula, with the coasts littered with fishing towns, pretty harbours and low cottages, it’s almost as if the Age of Sail never ended.

It is a daily tradition of mine to leave the apartment, cross the harbor, pass by the Old Roundhouse, and walk the beach alley, each day in contemplation of a different painting of waves, sealine and sky. While the scenery is rarely boring, there is one thing that remains always the same: the lighthouses. Lighthouses are structures of wonder and have enough philosophical charge for me to build an entire novel around. It’s of particular delight to hear their fog calls on cold rainy days.

Scottish people have a specific word for this miserable, wind-filled, misty weather: dreich. And you slowly learn to appreciate dreich weather. When I came to Scotland first, I wasn’t very fond of soaking and changing shoes and socks all the time, but now I don’t mind that too. I go out for a walk in any weather. It’s the closest I would ever feel to what the lives of mariners crossing the dreaded North Sea were, casting lines and folding sails in those stormy waters and under those sullen skies.