Ines Verrall

Ines Verrall was born in Harwich in 1979 and worked for eleven years as a marine insurance loss adjuster before publishing anything. She has said that the job taught her the two things she uses most: how to read a document written to conceal something, and how to describe water without adjectives.

Her first novella, Tidewrack, appeared from a small press in Cork in 2016 and sold, by her own account, four hundred copies, most of them to people she was related to. It was reissued after her second book, Cormorant Season, was shortlisted for the Lampeter Prize in 2021.

The Salt Line is her third book and her first with Mangan Press. She lives in Whitstable, walks a great deal, and is at work on a longer novel set among the same estuary families.

'I don't think of them as sad books,' she told an interviewer in 2024. 'I think of them as accurate ones. People find that sad, which is a different problem.'