PHOTO: Tui Allen kayaking near her Bay of Islands home, where the marine life and seascapes of her novels come vividly to life.
Marine Magic Meets Mythology And Mindfulness
Tui Allen blends visionary fiction with marine life, spirituality, and mythology in novels that reflect her deep, lived experience of the sea and the emotional power of nature.
Tui Allen writes from a place where the sea is not only a setting, but a soul-deep presence. Her life—shaped by a childhood immersed in sailing, by decades of oceanic exploration, and by intimate encounters with marine life—resonates throughout the pages of her fiction. The ocean is not merely a backdrop in her stories; it is the crucible from which her characters rise, shaped by wind, wave, and wonder.
In Ripple and Dolphin Melody, Allen brings forth a visionary blend of the mythic and the natural, channelled through the lives of sentient marine beings. These are not tales told from the shoreline, but from the heart of the swell itself. The sea, with all its mystery, depth, and music, becomes a conduit for exploring profound emotional and spiritual themes—grief, healing, belonging, and transcendence.
Allen’s writing invites us to reconsider what we think we know—about animals, about the sacred, and about ourselves. Her narratives carry the gentle insistence of waves: persistent, lyrical, and deeply affecting. With her, we enter a world where dolphins bear memories, where the divine might sing in ocean currents, and where imagination becomes a kind of listening.
To read her work is to encounter the marine realm not as metaphor, but as mirror. The sea speaks in her stories—sometimes in chords, sometimes in silence—and what it reflects back is as vast as it is unforgettable.
What inspired you to explore such deep emotional and spiritual themes through marine life in both Ripple and Dolphin Melody?
The great marine beings I meet face-to-face in the ocean are my main inspiration.
To be alone in mid-ocean surrounded by nothing but sea and stars is to discover spirit without need of any bible. As a teen I memorised Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner. This may have inspired my spiritual themes. I often recited the poem to myself, to pass time during long night watches, alone on the helm. I think of Coleridge as an early marine environmentalist because of this poem.
How do your personal experiences with the ocean influence the way you create your characters and settings?
There is a scene in Dolphin Melody where a kayaker is taken into the slipstream of a pod of dolphins. That happened to me in real life and in the same waters. I have it on video here.
Out in the deep sea far from land, alone on watch at night, I made long mental lists of vocations that dolphins might have or might not have. I decided, for example, that while a dolphin could never choose accountancy, they might well become an abstract mathematician. My stories show dolphins choosing and engaging in many of the vocations I imagined for them while I was in their world.
In Ripple, the concept of a pre-musical world is fascinating—how did you come up with that idea, and what does it symbolise for you?
I read somewhere, that the dolphin brain has ten times the capacity for processing sound as mankind has. I also knew that dolphins evolved tens of millions of years before modern humans. And yet we think that humans invented music?
The character of Melody faces profound trauma and healing—was there a particular reason you wanted to explore those themes through a dolphin’s perspective?
My beloved father died suddenly when I was six back in the late 1950s. In those days families avoided speaking of death for fear of upsetting the child. I was not taken to the funeral. He was rarely spoken of again throughout my childhood. I was expected to forget him. Unaware I was doing so, I bottled up all that grief until I hit my fifties, when a skilled healer removed all those psychiatric blockages releasing enough creative energy for me to sit down and write my two novels.
How do you approach blending mythology, like the presence of Hinemoana, with contemporary storytelling in Dolphin Melody?
The bay where I live with my imagined human characters is steeped in ancient Māori history and mythology. Hinemoana is the Māori goddess of the sea. My main human character Rōreka is Māori. His wife Manaia also carries Polynesian blood. I needed an omniscient and omnipresent narrator and Hinemoana fit perfectly for the world I wished to build. She is also the reason I preferred Māori place names over often-inappropriate English ones.
What challenges do you face when writing about animals in a way that maintains realism while also conveying deeper human emotions?
It’s important for all fiction, especially fantasy, to feel authentic, so that readers are encouraged to believe as they read. I researched carefully and constantly while writing to ensure that scientific accuracy in almost every aspect of dolphin and octopus biology was reflected in my stories. I read and even personally consulted scientists for this purpose. The rainbow colours of the dolphins in Ripple were an exception to this rule but I had good reasons for that, which I won’t explain here. The only imaginary aspects of my stories are those that no human could know. That is, all that goes on inside the minds of these beings – the marine “idea-sphere” or Ocean Mind.
Have readers ever shared surprising or meaningful interpretations of your work that made you see your own stories differently?
Often. People working with psychologically troubled teens have surprised me by describing how these youngsters identify with Ripple’s oddball status. Like some of them she is different, outcast, and woefully misunderstood. One school counsellor told me she thought Ripple should be on every school’s required reading list, because while helping these troubled ones, it also helps untroubled teens to consider hidden possibilities in their not-so-lucky classmates, thereby building greater acceptance of difference.
Religious readers have also surprised me. I thought they might find my light-hearted interpretation of the divine too frivolous. Instead, they broad-mindedly embrace my flawed and fun-loving deities, frolicsome seraphim and angelic choristers.
What advice would you offer to other authors hoping to write stories that combine nature, emotion, and spiritual depth as you do?
Simply to go out and spend time in the natural environment you wish to write about. If setting your story in a forest, spend plenty of time under the trees, absorbing the plants, animals and divinity of the forest world. Likewise for mountains, deserts, and even the skies. Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, spent much time flying to learn the spiritual depth of the skies. Jack London might not have written White Fang and Call of the Wild if he’d never spent time in Alaska.
Why did you write these books?
Firstly, to suggest possible consequences of dolphin extinction that most people will never have considered. Secondly, to suggest the potential of the unguessable Ocean Mind.
