Sea Marked: Linda Cracknell in conversation with Rosie Hilton

Linda Cracknell’s quest to learn more about her seafaring family history brings her to a blustery harbour. As she throws a line to pull in a boat, she is struck by the parallel with her mission to reel the past closer to the present, to find her place in a family tree full of mariners whose lives were defined by the ebb and flow of tides.

Exploring coastlines from Scotland to Cornwall by boat and foot, she retraces the footsteps and paths of her ancestors across marshes, clifftops and waves. She travels in a 121-year-old sailboat and helps to build a community rowing boat. Gradually, she understands that the women in this story were the linchpins of the coastal communities they lived in – and the undertow of her own identity. All the while, she is untangling her complex relationship with her mother.

What begins as a quest for legacy takes Linda well beyond, as she discovers something more elemental and unconscious in her pull to the sea, imagining her blood as salt-saturated, sea-marked.

Place, memory and motion are at the heart of Linda Cracknell's writing. A great walker, as reflected in her 2024, non-fiction, Doubling Back: Paths trodden in memory, she also excavates history and myth in fiction with Caithness-set Call of the Undertow and The Other Side of Stone which focuses across time on a Perthshire woollen mill. Her latest book, SEA MARKED: THROWING A LINE TO A COASTAL PAST is a memoir exploring her seafaring ancestry in north Devon. She lives in Scotland and teaches creative writing widely.

Rosie Hilton is an Editor at Octopus, a non-fiction publisher and a division of Hachette UK. She worked previously (2020 to spring 2025) at Manchester-based independent press Saraband, where she was Linda's editor for SEA MARKED. She also writes poetry, and in 2023 she was shortlisted for Emerging Publisher of the Year at Scotland’s National Book Awards.