Erin Hart

Ever since HAUNTED GROUND was first published in 2003, I’ve had great pleasure meeting and corresponding with people from all over the country and all over the world. Even after all this time, I confess I’m still a little stunned— and incredibly honored to have been nominated and selected for a number of awards. I'd like to offer a sincere and grateful thank you to all the wonderful readers, booksellers, librarians, and fellow writers who have helped to make this such an incredible and rewarding trip!

Before straying serendipitously into crime fiction, Erin Hart trained to become a theater director, and has been variously employed as a stage manager, propmaster, editor and copywriter, writing teacher, journalist and theater critic. Born in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and raised in Rochester, Minnesota, Erin was educated at Saint Olaf College and the University of Minnesota.

After college she also promoted the work of traditional musician friends and helped co-found a local Irish Music & Dance Association. Erin met her husband, Irish accordion player Paddy O’Brien, just after returning from a trip to Ireland—when he asked her onstage to sing.

Erin came to writing quite late, and by way of her first love, theater. Starting graduate school in the mid-1980s, the available choices were business administration or creative writing—she chose writing almost by default, and embarked on a second career as a freelance arts journalist and theater critic. Throughout the 1990s, her work appeared in print in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Minnesota Monthly, and Skyway News, and for several years she was the regular theater critic for Minnesota Public Radio. She also began to write memoir, essays, and short fiction. When her short story, “Waterborne,” won the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers in 1996, she began to receive inquiries from literary agents.

While visiting friends in Ireland one summer, Erin heard an intriguing tale about a beautiful red-haired girl whose perfectly preserved severed head was discovered in a desolate Irish bog. That true story was the inspiration for her debut novel, HAUNTED GROUND, the first in a planned series of crime novels set mostly in Ireland, revolving around archaeology, forensics, history, traditional music and folklore. HAUNTED GROUND has been translated into ten foreign languages; the second novel in the series, LAKE OF SORROWS, was published in October 2004.

“People often ask why I chose Ireland as a setting, and I have to say that I think Ireland chose me,” she says. “It’s a place I’ve been drawn to more than any other ever since I was a child. There’s something about Ireland’s complex and contradictory nature, all those layers of history one on top of the other—that lends a particular resonance to the kinds of stories I feel compelled to tell.”

Erin lives with her husband Paddy O'Brien in Minnesota. They make frequent visits to Ireland, going to music sessions, and carrying out essential research in bogs and cow pastures and castles and pubs.