Blake Gunnels is an award-winning novelist and practicing landscape architect based in Central Florida. His fiction is rooted in real coastal places he knows deeply, especially Saint Simons Island, Georgia, and the Cape Fear coast of North Carolina. His debut novel, By the Light of the Bluff, won the 2025 International Firebird Book Award for Southern Fiction, and his Cape Fear Thriller Series introduces Southport harbormaster Nora Banks.

Blake Gunnels is an award-winning novelist and practicing landscape architect based in Central Florida. His fiction is shaped by real coastal places he knows deeply: the marsh creeks and lighthouse bluffs of Saint Simons Island, the working waterfront of the Cape Fear coast, and the tidal rhythms of communities that live by the water.

His debut novel, By the Light of the Bluff, was inspired by nearly twenty years of summer visits to Saint Simons Island with his family. The novel features Jesse Whitmore, a woman in hiding who flees a violent marriage and builds a new life around BluffLight, an invented lighthouse on a real and deeply researched island. By the Light of the Bluff was published on June 16, 2025, and won the 2025 International Firebird Book Award for Southern Fiction.

His Cape Fear Thriller Series introduces Nora Banks, harbormaster in Southport, North Carolina. The series begins with What the Tide Took and continues with When the Tide Turns, launching September 1, 2026.

Blake builds invented characters to carry readers into real places. The place is often the subject; the character is how he gets you inside it.