J. D. Davies is the prolific author of historical naval adventures. He is also one of the foremost authorities on the seventeenth-century navy, which brings a high level of historical detail to his fiction, namely his Matthew Quinton series. He has written widely on the subject, most recently Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy,and won the Samuel Pepys Award in 2009 with Pepys's Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare, 1649-1689.