Stranded on an Island: The Inspiration Behind Lost on Gibbon Island

Author Jess Butterworth talks about her book Lost on Gibbon Island 

When I was 19 years old I travelled to Cambodia in search of ancient temples and endangered gibbons. After I first arrived in the capital city, many people I met suggested I should visitan island off the coast in the Gulf of Thailand. They said the island hadn’t been developed yet and was full of wildlife,which I thought sounded great so I headed to the beach, where I was able to ask a fishing boat to take me there. I packed for a couple of days on the island and arranged for the fishing boat to return to collect me in three days.  

The island was surrounded by crystal clear water with golden beaches hugging a jungle. There were no roads or electricity but there were some people living on the island and they arranged for me to stay in a wooden hut on the beach. My days were filled with swimming, writing, reading and watching the wildlife. I didn’t see any gibbons but I did see plenty of tree snakes, geckos, monkeys, turtles and horn bills.  

On the third day, as I waited for the fishing boat to return, a tropical storm hit and the sea became very rough, with huge foaming waves. It was far too rough for the fishing boat to show up and I even saw a waterspout from my hut: a whirling column of mist and air over the sea. The sea became full of jellyfish. I buckled down for a stormy night in the hut, with a bunch of screeching frogs as my new roommates, and felt very homesick.   

The storm went on for days and days and I ended up stuck on the island for over a week.Luckily I had shelter, water and food, but I couldn’t help but wonder what it might be like to really be shipwrecked on an island like the one I was on. One of my favourite books when I was younger was Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo, about a boy who is shipwrecked on a pacific island and I always dreamed of writing my own castaway story one day. Gibbon island is a fictional place but it was inspired by this experience. 

On the tenth day, the fishing boat was finally able to collect me from the island, but it couldn’t get close enough to the mainland to drop me off because the waves were too big. I had to swim with my backpack on, trying to keep my passport dry above my head and the waves. While I was writing the book, I drew on this experience to imagine what it would be like to try and swim while holding a baby gibbon above the water.  

Once I was safely back on land, I let my family know that I was okay (as I hadn’t had a phone or any way to communicate with them whilst on the island), before heading to the temples and forestof Cambodia where I finally saw howling gibbons. And they’ve been one of my favourite animals since.  

Before I wrote Lost on Gibbon Island, I learnt that over the previous decade over 1,700 environmental activists have been murdered. Many were people protecting the place they live in from being destroyed; thirteen were environmental journalists. I always tell young people to write about the things they care about and feel passionately about and I knew that this was an issue I wanted to weave into the story. As well as a castaway story, I wanted it to be a book about standing up for what you believe in and the risks in doing so, about protecting our environment and endangered gibbons.   

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