Hello, my name is James Carmody. I am the author of 'The Girl Who Dreamt of Dolphins', 'Dolphin-Child' and 'Midnight Dolphin', The three books form The Dolphin Child Trilogy about a girl called Lucy Parr and the special ability she has to communicate with a dolphin called Spirit.

 

I was born in 1967 and so am in my late forties . I live in London with my wife and daughter. I was inspired to write about dolphins when we visited Zanzibar (off the coast of Tanzania) in the summer of 2010. We went on a dolphin watching trip one day from a small village down the coast from Stone Town.

 

I thought that this would be an amazing experience in which we swam with dolphins who would come up to us and greet us. Instead there were any number of tourist boats pursuing a pod of dolphins. Every time dolphins would surface, the boats would all buzz over to them them and the tourists would pile into the water to be able to say that they had swum with dolphins.

 

I felt rather uncomfortable about the whole experience and felt that we were harassing the dolphins more than communing with them. Afterwards I thought, 'What if it really were possible to communicate with dolphins?'

 

The books I have now written imagine dolphins as if they were similar in their thinking to humans. This 'anthropomorphism'  is common in fiction but is something that most scientists frown upon. The potrayal of dolphin lives in my books are not factually based, though I have drawn upon my reading around the subject.

 

I have therefore aimed to ensure the factual accuracy of the information on this site, but if you want to raise anything with me, whether sharing an experience, making a suggestion or pointing out a correction, do use the contact form link to drop me a line.

 

James Carmody. November 2014.