Even less likely was the prospect that such as illustrious award might come decades later for an autobiography charting his lifelong love affair with a sport widely regarded in his home country as a frivolous counterculture. 

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, the decorated New Yorker writer’s ode to his oceanic addiction, won the Pulitzer for biography this year. Judges described it as a “finely crafted memoir of a youthful obsession that has propelled the author through a distinguished writing career”. Tracks magazine alternatively interpreted it as a book that proves “you can dedicate half your life to getting barrelled and still become a mainstream success”.

Amused by that assessment, Finnegan acknowledges the book has been received differently here than in America, where his story is regarded as more of a curiosity.

“American reviews tend to say, oh here’s this guy who’s spent half his life surfing and he’s telling us about surfing ... you know, how original of him,” he says.

“Australian reviews are sort of opposite. They say, we’ve had so many books about world champions and famous surfers, finally here’s a book for the rest of us. We all spent our 20s under a palm tree looking for waves, and here’s a guy who spent his 20s under a palm tree looking for waves.”

Finnegan is headed to Newcastle on August 3 for a Newcastle Writers Festival ‘in conversation’ session at Noah’s on the Beach, ahead of an appearance at the Byron Bay writers festival from August 5-7.

Though the still avid surfer missed the city on his youthful odyssey 40 years ago, he is looking forward to atoning for that oversight and has been forewarned to pack a board in case of a repeat of the epic winter swell that swept through last month. 

Raised in Los Angeles and Hawaii, Finnegan was introduced to surfing at an early age, but it was during his teenage years on Oahu that the fixation set in. Racial conflict was rife in his neighbourhood and Cliffs, his home break, became an escape from schoolyard violence and tribalism.

The first part of the book charts his coming of age, both as a youth and surfer, pushing himself as he matures on to ever bigger waves in ever more gnarly breaks. There is a simultaneously comical and alarming recount of a session at Maui’s Honolua Bay, where he paddled out in an unforgiving swell on acid (it was the ’70s) and somehow managed to not only survive but also notch up one of the rides of his life. 

In 1978, Finnegan embarked on an Endless Summer-style search for waves across Asia, the South Pacific, Australia and South Africa, mapping out his boy’s own adventure and chancing upon some then uncharted or little-surfed spots that have since become fabled breaks, Fiji’s Tavarua among them.

A stint teaching in a high school for black students in Cape Town during the apartheid era ultimately brought the party to an end, as Finnegan came to terms with the ugliness of state-sanctioned discrimination and decided to abandon his dreams of novel writing to pursue political journalism.

Barbarian Days is a departure from the hard-hitting long-form journalism for which he has since become renowned, and is a subject he suppressed for many years.

“I was nervous about coming out of the closet as a surfer,” he says. “I was writing political opinion columns quite a lot and I thought this is going to somehow undermine my credibility,” he recalls.

Finnegan finally revealed his alternative existence in a much-lauded 1992 series for the New Yorker that documented his surfing sessions in cold, remorseless San Francisco swells with a fearless big-wave hunter named Doc Renneker.

Barbarian Days is written for the general reader, with helpful explanations about ocean dynamics and surf jargon for those unacquainted, but also holds the attention of surfers, especially with its seductive retelling of fearful situations in which the author pushes his limits – a gut-tightening scenario with which all board riders identify.

“I am not a big-wave surfer, but surfers who are have remarked on those scenes,” he says. “I’ve said to them, ‘You wouldn’t even have been scared out there,’ and they say, yeah but they were scared reading it. They could feel I was near the edge.”

Finnegan says dealing with fear and learning how to quickly adapt in unfamiliar environments turned out to be good grounding for his later investigative forays into conflict zones and organised crime. 

Ironically, while he has attracted wide praise for his eloquent ability to unpack the mystique of surfing, Finnegan admits he is still much more comfortable doing it than talking about it.

“I’m not inclined to really wax very poetic about the spiritual side of surfing,” he reflects. “I’s a very personal thing.

 “For the longest time, I didn’t write about it, I didn’t think to write about it because it was just what I did, and I like it that way.

“Kind of unexamined.”