About Elena Ward
Novelist, former coastguard radio operator and lifelong reader of tide tables.
I was born on Bryher, the smallest inhabited of the Scilly Isles, in a house that shook whenever the wind came round to the west. There were forty-one children in my school and one library van that came on the ferry every second Thursday. I read everything on it, including the van’s manual.
After a degree in English at Exeter I spent nine years as a coastguard radio operator in Falmouth, listening to the sea on the night shift and writing in the gaps. The Cartographer’s Widow was finished on those nights and published in 2014.
Since then I have written six more novels, including the four books of the Saltmarsh Quartet, which follow three generations of one family on the fictional island of Merrow. I write by hand first, always in blue-black ink, and type the second draft in a shed at the bottom of the garden.
— Elena
Milestones
- 2014
Debut novel
The Cartographer’s Widow is published and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize.
- 2016
The Saltmarsh Quartet begins
The Lantern Keeper’s Daughter becomes a Richard & Judy Book Club pick.
- 2019
Costa shortlist
A Harbour of Small Hours is shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award.
- 2023
The quartet is complete
The Last Light at Merrow goes straight in at number two on the fiction chart.
- 2026
A new chapter
The Glasshouse Year is published in hardback in March.
Where the books come from
