Kate Allen is a writer from Massachusetts, and The Line Tender is her debut novel. Allen was inspired to write the story by an incident that took place one summer when she was working at a candy shop in Beverly, Massachusetts: A local fisherman caught a great white shark off the coast where she used to swim. Allen studied writing at Bates College. After becoming a teacher in Minneapolis, she took writing courses at the Loft Literary Center, where she completed The Line Tender. Allen is an amateur beekeeper and is interested in the connections between art, science, and conservation. To ensure that the scientific concepts in The Line Tender are accurate, she conducted extensive research with shark biologists and interviewed the original fisherman who caught the great white shark in Beverly.

Marine biology is the study of oceanic organisms and environments. It is split into different disciplines based on organisms of study and specific sections of ocean topography. For example, Helen Everhart, Lucy’s mother, was a marine biologist whose area of study was sharks, specifically great white sharks in the coast off Cape Cod. Marine biologists can work for independent research laboratories, universities, and science departments of state governments.