Steve Hawk has spent nearly six decades surfing and most of his career editing magazines. Now the El Granada resident has written a thriller set on the coast he knows. His first novel, Nearshore, came out Aug. 18 from Viking.
The story
Hawk's website says the book opens with a small nuclear bomb going off beside a highway in West Virginia, the first act of nuclear terrorism in history. Palo Alto Online reports the plot follows a surfer named Jamie Palmer whose world collides with Stanford academics who find a possible link between the attack and Silicon Valley. Hawk's site notes that a famous 2024 wave ridden at Mavericks gets a nod in the book.
From editor to novelist
Penguin Random House says Hawk is a former editor of Surfer, Sierra and Stanford Business magazines. Palo Alto Online reports he spent eight years running Surfer and has lived on the Coastside for almost three decades. He is the brother of skateboarder Tony Hawk, and the publisher says the two are co-writing a book on skateboarding's history and culture.
Hawk told Embarcadero Media he wanted to combine two worlds: the dense research he translated at Stanford's business school and the ocean he drove home to each night. He wrote one chapter in a Stanford Continuing Studies fiction class and said the book took about five years. After retiring from Stanford, he said, he planned his days around whether the surf was good.
His advice to aspiring writers: "Even if you don't know where it's going, just keep writing."