Thrasy Petropoulos lives by the eternally beautiful Aegean Sea, in southern Athens. That, in itself, is enough to have inspired Max Panamax and the Western Key.
From the coastline, near where he lives, you can see the distant silhouettes of bulk carriers – any one of which could be Max – carrying their cargo to distant lands.
But there were many other inspirations behind Leo and Captain Cadmus’s journey around the world.
As a journalist and avid traveller, he has visited many of the places to which Max ventures – all the way to Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh and trading ports in eastern China and elsewhere. His characters have borrowed – but never stolen – from many of the personalities he met along the way.
As he switched sports journalism for newspapers in England, where he was born, to news reporting in Greece, he found himself travelling less – at least with his feet. The impetus for venturing into fiction came from his children – Lucas, Alex and Gregory, to whom Max Panamax and the Western Key is dedicated. It was Lucas’s early love of ships and all things nautical that sowed the seeds for the story of Max Panamax, and the encouragement of all three to see the crew safely back to Southampton. So thanks goes to them, along with his wife, Kerry, for allowing Max into their lives.
If there’s one thing he wishes to share with readers of Max Panamax, it’s an endless curiosity about the world in which we live – its incredible geography, the diversity of its inhabitants, and that injustices are worth fighting for.
And the extraordinary connections we find where we expect them least. Destiny is, indeed, a very strange thing.
A special thanks also goes to Cecilie and Gilles for their beautiful illustrations and to the many friends and family members who have offered their support and gentle guidance in helping Max take shape. And to all the drivers of the A2 bus in Athens, on the back seats of which many of Max’s earliest adventures were dreamt up.
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