Your first book is the autobiographical Lady With a Spear. Its author Eugenie Clark is someone who has dived the world, just like you.

I had the great honour of meeting her earlier this year. She is in her late eighties now and is an absolute inspiration to me. Getting a chance to sit down and chat with her over lunch was a joy. She has been studying the ocean for 60 years. She is still diving, still researching and still as much in love with the ocean as she ever was. I felt a huge connection with her.

This book describes a time when she was a pioneering female scientist, going off and having adventures and following her extraordinary obsession with the ocean. She spent time in Egypt studying the fishes of the Red Sea, as a single female at a time when such things were completely unheard of. To some extent she is one of the female underwater explorers who isn’t quite so famous, and she really should be.

Where did she come from?

She is American, grew up in New York and tells a lovely story of how she fell in love with fish at a young age when visiting the New York aquarium. She went on to become known as the “shark lady” for her studies of shark behaviour, and founded the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory, now known as the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida. Her second book, The Lady and the Sharks, describes how that was set up and how she raised her family at the same time in what then was a remote, undeveloped part of Florida.

She actually spent most of her career up in Maryland, where she was a professor at the university there. I only wish I could have been one of her students, it must have been so exciting to work with her. She has spent her whole life teaching and researching. And she is still doing it because she loves it so much she can’t give it up.

Do you think you will end up like that?

I would love to be like that. If I get to that age and I am still diving and exploring the oceans, it would be fabulous.

The next book on your list is Tim Winton’s novel Blueback, which is set in a very beautiful part of Australia.

I read this story years ago and it is just lovely. Winton calls it a fable for all ages and I think that is absolutely true. I read it to my nephews when they were about seven but I think everyone should read it no matter how old they are. It is about a boy called Abel Jackson who grows up in this gorgeous part of what I presume is the Western Australian coast, because that is where the author hails from. The story tells how Abel goes diving every day. He makes friends with a huge blue fish he names Blueback.

It is part adventure story, part ode to the oceans. You see the unfolding problems of the modern world pushing in on his beloved bay. Abel decides that he wants to study the sea to figure it out and solve the puzzle of why the ocean is getting sick. And on a lighter note he wants to learn the language of the sea. He wants to know what Blueback is thinking about. It is beautifully written and very evocative. Ultimately, it is a story about childhood dreams and realising it is never too late to go back and relive them.

It also discusses the problems of overfishing by predatory fishermen.

Yes, one part of the story is that fishermen come and pillage the bay where Abel and his mother live. It describes the efforts they make to stop that happening, but I don’t want to spoil the ending.