Gregory Day is a writer, poet and musician whose debut novel The Patron Saint Of Eels won the prestigious Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 2006. Gregory's previous books include Trace (in collaboration with photographer Robert Ashton). His CDs include The Black Tower: Songs from the Poetry of WB Yeats, and The Flash Road: Scenes From The Building of the Great Ocean Road. He lives in Victoria.

Author's statement regarding Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds:
Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds is a novel focusing on the different ways we value our environment in 21st century Australia. It is a loving tribute to the DIY past of coastal and rural lives, where people by necessity lived in close and practical contact with the natural world around them, but it is also a sympathetic portrait of the struggles younger generations are having now, as they grapple with their own good intentions, in an attempt to dwell in a landscape that contemporary life has abstracted them from.

The novel has been inspired by great people and stories that I have grown up amongst, and by personal reflections on my own generation and how we compare with those gone before us. The book is full of music, ocean, poetry and weather, the natural and cultural textures that sustain us in life. It is textured with old dialect and new "spin", and shows the real and often unwitting ways in which these disparate languages intersect and collide.

More than anything though Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds is an artist's plea for us all to fall back in love with the earth that sustains us, to live in scale and true awareness of our landscape, and to conduct our lives with compassion as the first principle, so that we can reach out across the cultural divides that surround us in the 21st century.