My first book is coming soon!
Breaking the Surface: The Extraordinary Life of Honor Frost and the Dawn of Underwater Archaeology, is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press.
The story
Blending science, art, and history, Breaking the Surface narrates the remarkable life story of Honor Frost — one of the world’s first female SCUBA divers and a pioneer of underwater archaeology — who discovered and excavated major shipwrecks and submerged sites around the Mediterranean, including the Pharos Lighthouse at Alexandria and the only known Punic warship, in Sicily.
Born to British expats in Cyprus and orphaned as a child, Frost’s talent for illustration and design were apparent from the beginning. She studied art in London with luminaries such as Lucian Freud, until she quit school during World War II to drive a fire truck and marry an army captain. (They separated six weeks later.)
After the war, Frost worked as Director of Publications for the Tate Gallery and designed ballets. But her life changed forever when, during a convalescence in France in the early 1950s, she managed to talk her way into Jacques Cousteau’s all-male diving club, the Alpin Sous-Marin. She fell in love with diving and quickly concluded that “time spent above water was time wasted.” In 1957, she was recruited as a technical illustrator for a dig in Palestine with the world-renowned archaeologist Kay Kenyon.
Armed with a unique combination of diving and excavation skills, Frost then turned her attention to a task that the archaeology world have long believed was impossible: excavating shipwrecks submerged more than 100 feet underwater.
Frost conducted much of her early work on shipwrecks in Bodrum, Turkey.
A project five-plus years in the making
I first discovered Frost and her work by accident in the basement of a museum in Palermo, Sicily, in January 2017. Inspired by her adventurous spirit and fierce intellect, I’ve been wanting to tell her story ever since.
By late 2020, I had already spent two years doing independent research, one year writing a proposal that I shopped to agents, and almost another year completely rewriting that proposal with the help of the agent who agreed to represent me. But the proposal still needed more work: more scenes, more detail, more texture. So my partner and I decided to do something different. Since it was the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and we were both working remotely, we decided to rent a sailboat and spend three months in the Mediterranean, where we would keep doing our normal jobs while I conducted research and interviews for the book.
In May 2021, we sublet our apartment in Milan and flew to Athens, then set sail to Turkey on a 32-foot boat. The trip was exciting and challenging (you can see photos and read more about it on my Instagram). Fortunately, our gamble paid off. After a few more months revising the proposal to incorporate the new material, St. Martin’s acquired the project in spring 2022.
Visiting the Punic Ship, one of Frost’s most important contributions to underwater archaeology, in Marsala, Sicily.