Francesca de Tores' Saltblood is the winner of the 2024 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. 

In a rented room outside Plymouth in 1685, a daughter is born as her half-brother is dying. Her mother makes a decision: Mary will become Mark, and Ma will continue to collect his inheritance money.

Mary’s dual existence as Mark will lead to a role as a footman in a grand house, serving a French mistress; to the navy, learning who to trust and how to navigate by the stars; and to the army and the battlegrounds of Flanders, finding love among the bloodshed and the mud. But none of this will stop Mary yearning for the sea.

Drawn back to the water, Mary must reinvent herself yet again, for a woman aboard a ship is a dangerous thing. This time Mary will become something more dangerous than a woman.

She will become a pirate.

Breathing life into the Golden Age of Piracy, Saltblood is a wild adventure, a treasure trove, weaving an intoxicating tale of gender and survival, passion and loss, journeys and transformation, through the story of Mary Read, one of history’s most remarkable figures.

About the Author: Francesca de Tores is a novelist, poet and academic. She is the author of four previous novels, published in more than 20 languages. In addition to a collection of poems, her poetry is widely published in journals and anthologies. Saltblood is her first historical novel. She grew up in Lutruwita/Tasmania and, after fifteen years in England, is now living in Naarm/Melbourne.

WNSF: Congratulations on winning the Best Published Novel award! What does adventure writing mean to you? Would you have considered yourself an adventure writer before being shortlisted for the Prize?

Francesca: To me, adventure writing is less about any particular genre, and more about what’s at stake. It’s about stories that go right to the brink, not only physically but also emotionally. I think some of my earlier novels could be considered adventure writing, but none as much as Saltblood, because Mary Read’s life was so full of remarkable risks, both external (wars! piracy!) and internal (navigating her multiple and fluid identities).

But I’m also interested in the ways that a novel’s language itself can be adventurous, and can take risks and make creative leaps. In trying to capture Mary Read’s voice, so distant in time and experience from my own, I had to take risks with language, to try to find a voice bold and nuanced enough to accommodate Read’s extraordinary character. In this sense, the book’s form as well as its narrative had to be adventurous.

WNSF: Are there any particular books or authors which have made a lasting impact on you?

Francesca: When I was writing Saltblood, I was always writing under the influence of two novels that had become my totemic examples of historical fiction: Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End, a masterclass in narrative voice, and in covering sweeping historical events with an extraordinary lightness of touch; Toni Morrison’s Beloved, one of the few perfect novels, which shows how the past refuses to leave us. Brilliant novels like this become not only inspirations, but also a form of permission; I read them and am staggered by their boldness and precision, and find myself thinking: ‘Oh! I never realised we’re allowed to do that!’

WNSF: Can you tell us about any adventurous experiences in your life? Have they influenced you as a writer or your writing?

Francesca: I used to do a lot of rock climbing, but in recent years surfing (not very well) has been my main form of adventure. Because I grew up in Lutruwita/Tasmania, I was raised surrounded by water, and that passion for the ocean played a big part in the writing of Saltblood, with its sailors, storms and pirates. Mary Read survived as both a Royal Navy sailor and then a pirate – both roles so unimaginably arduous and dangerous (particularly as a woman) that I couldn’t imagine how she could risk it without having a love of the sea to sustain her. Mary and I share that passion for the sea.

WNSF: The Librarians and Library Staff who read, reviewed and selected your book for the shortlist wanted to ask some questions too. One asked: 'Saltblood offers a fresh perspective on the Golden Age of Piracy, exploring themes of gender identity, survival, and transformation through Mary's remarkable journey. Can you share more about your research process and how you wove together historical facts with fictional elements to create such a rich and immersive narrative?

Francesca: There’s a wealth of information available about both piracy and the period, but there are hardly any documents dealing directly with Mary Read and Anne Bonny. The transcript of their 1720 trial is invaluable, and their names also appear in Governor Woodes Rogers’ proclamation about the theft of the ship William a few months earlier. Beyond that, we’re left mainly at the mercy of Captain Charles Johnson (not his real name, which remains a mystery), who wrote A General History of the Pyrates, a fabulously entertaining but clearly fanciful account that includes Bonny and Read. Because Johnson isn’t the most reliable source, I had to be cautious about which aspects of his story could be trusted – but, interestingly, my research supported even some of the more far-fetched seeming elements of Johnson’s account. For example, it’s Johnson who gives us the detail of Mary Read serving as a man in the Royal Navy and army, which might seem implausible – but history reveals at least one other documented example of a woman (Christian ‘Kit’ Cavanagh/Davies/Welsh) who served in the army during the same period, for two different wars, and was discovered only after being seriously injured. So we do have a historical precedent for this fascinating part of Mary’s adventures.

The lack of historical certainty about Mary’s life would be a nightmare for a historian – but for a novelist, it was a delight. All these gaps in the historical record gave me space in which to speculate – particularly about the relationship between Mary Read and Anne Bonny. I’d like to think that my imaginings are informed by all my research – but at a certain point in writing Saltblood, I found that my greatest loyalty was no longer to the (sparse) historical record, but to the voice of Mary Read that had begun to emerge. There she was, this remarkable woman: courageous; resolute; carving a life for herself in a hostile world. Once her voice took charge of the story, I felt that my job was to get out of her way and let her speak.

WNSF: Another said, 'Your portrayal of Mary Read as a complex and multifaceted protagonist is truly captivating. What inspired you to choose her as the central figure for this adventurous tale, and how did you approach balancing historical accuracy with creative storytelling? From what I could find after I read your novel, there are only sketchy historical records about Mary Read’s life. How did you go about fleshing her out as a character?'

Francesca: History gave me the bare bones of Mary Read’s life – but to flesh her out as a character required speculation. From the extraordinary adventures she undertook, I knew she had to be resolute, resourceful, and incredibly brave. But because of the necessity of hiding her biological sex for so many years, I also had a strong sense that Mary would have been rather self-contained – her survival often depended on not opening herself up to others. This is where her mysterious crow companion comes in. The historical records make no mention, of course, of Mary being accompanied by a crow – as the historical note at the book’s end makes clear, this is pure speculation on my part. But after a year or more of researching Mary Read’s life, the crow alighted in the draft and would not be shooed away. There was something so fitting about the forbidding, black bird that becomes Mary’s constant witness – it sees the truth of her, even before she herself has come to terms with the complexity of her real identity. I was interested in how something entirely invented, like Mary’s crow, could serve to illuminate the historical reality of Mary, and to bring her character to life.

Another crucial aspect of fleshing out Mary’s character was being able to draw on the insights of Eris Young, my sensitivity reader. I spent years researching historical ships, right down to the details of the rigging, so it would’ve been foolish to neglect to research the other aspects of Mary’s life in which I’m not an expert. History shows that Mary’s relationship with gender must obviously have been fluid and complex – it was a joy to be able to draw on Eris’ wisdom to try to ensure that Saltblood was nuanced and accurate in its treatment of Mary’s gender identity.

WNSF: One of our panelists said, 'I just wanted to say thank you to Francesca de Tores for writing a great book! Are you working on another book yet?'

Francesca: Thank you! I’m currently neck deep in my next historical novel – the story of Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish sailor who was abandoned for more than four years on a remote island off the coast of Chile, and who later became the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. I wasn’t ready to leave the world of eighteenth-century sailors, having become so obsessed with that milieu while writing Saltblood – so it’s a joy to have an excuse to linger there a while longer…

WNSF: Your novel is historical fiction. Why did you choose to write about this time? Or that particular place in this time?

Francesca: I adored writing about the early 18th-century because it’s a period that seems to be less frequently traversed by historical novelists. In English historical fiction we have a wealth of writing about the Tudor period, and about Victorian times, but the centuries in between seem to get less attention. The more I learned about the early 1700s, the more enthralled I was. It was such a potent period, roiling with wars, international intrigue, and the wealth of empires being built on the labour of enslaved people. And ships, which barely feature in the modern imagination, were so central to all of it: wars were won on the basis of strong navies; both victims and profits of empire were transported by ships; and pirates were there, amongst it all, wreaking havoc…

WNSF: How do you make sure your characters, their voice and actions, sit comfortably within the historical context?

Francesca: This was something I worked really hard at, because as a reader I dislike it when a character in a historical novel feels like a mouthpiece for contemporary ideas, which would in fact have been completely anachronistic in the period. I didn’t want Mary Read to be holding forth about 21st-century notions about gender and feminism – that would have undermined all the years of research that I’d spent trying to accurately evoke the 1700s! 

But what I felt did allow me to explore these ideas through her character was the fact that she had the very real experience of having lived as both a man and a woman – which meant that her own experience would very starkly demonstrate for her the differences in the way the world reacts to different genders. I felt that this made it inevitable, rather than contrived, that Mary would reflect on the different ways in which she’s able to move through the world depending on whether she’s presenting as male or female.

WNSF: What would you consider to be the upsides, and the downsides, of being an author?

Francesca: I hope I’ll never take it for granted that it’s my job to invent stories and to play with language. Getting to spend my days researching and writing, and having readers engage with the stories that I create, is the greatest privilege and joy. Of course, there are days that are harder than others. The first-draft writing stage is usually a delight; the subsequent task of editing a document of more than 100,000 words into some kind of compelling shape is sheer graft. But I try not to be self-indulgent about it – writers can sometimes be a bit precious about the process, as though writing is some rare kind of magic. I’ve never been tolerant of the idea of Writer’s Block, for example, because it’s an indulgence not extended to other professions (have you ever heard anyone complain about Dentist’s Block, or Taxi-Driver’s Block?). Instead, I try to just keep working at it, and tell myself that even a bad day’s work draws me a few steps closer to that elusive final draft.

WNSF: Thank you so much for answering our questions, and congratulations again on being shortlisted! 

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Saltblood was announced as the winner of the 2024 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize at an awards reception in London on 19th September 2024.