Laurell K. Hamilton

Laurell Kaye Hamilton, born Laurell Kaye Klein on February 19, 1963, is an American fantasy and romance writer best known for two long-running series: Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter and Merry Gentry. She was born in Heber Springs, Arkansas, and grew up in Sims, Indiana, with her grandmother Laura Gentry. Her education combined English and biology at Marion College, now Indiana Wesleyan University, a private Evangelical Christian liberal arts college in Marion, Indiana, affiliated with the Wesleyan Church denomination.

Hamilton met Gary Hamilton at Marion College, and they married. They have one daughter, Trinity. In 2001, Hamilton married Jonathon Green. She lives in St. Louis County, Missouri, with her daughter Trinity and her husband Jonathon. Away from publishing, she has been involved with a number of animal charities, with particular support for dog rescue efforts and wolf preservation.

The series that made Hamilton a major name in fantasy is Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter. Anita Blake is an animator and necromancer who raises the dead for a living, works as a vampire executioner, and later becomes a U.S. Marshal. She lives in a fictional St. Louis where vampires and were-animals exist and have recently gained some rights as citizens. The series includes novels, short story collections, novellas, and comic books. As of November 2013, Hamilton had published 22 novels and 5 novellas in the Anita Blake series. As of 2009, more than 6 million copies of Anita Blake novels had been printed, and several had become New York Times bestsellers.

Hamilton’s other major series, Merry Gentry, centers on Meredith Gentry, Princess of the Unseelie court of Faerie and a private investigator. Merry faces repeated assassination attempts while living in the “real world,” where everyone knows faeries exist. As of 2014, the series had nine novels. Hamilton has also written spin-off comic books, anthologies, and stand-alone titles. Her long-time editor was Susan Allison at Penguin Group. The Anita Blake comics adapted the first three books, Guilty Pleasures, The Laughing Corpse, and Circus of the Damned, and included a special prologue comic called The First Death.

Hamilton’s fiction helped define the modern urban-fantasy genre for a broad readership. USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, and Time identified her work as a major contribution to the genre’s development, and in 2008 Time wrote that the genre’s popularity “owes everything to Laurell K. Hamilton.” Her books also drew mixed reactions as the Anita Blake series shifted from crime noir thriller toward stronger sexual themes beginning with Narcissus in Chains. Some reviewers and readers criticized the change, while others found the erotic elements to be part of the series’s appeal. That debate is part of why Hamilton remains a widely discussed writer: her fiction brings creatures of legend into recognizable places, gives women central power, danger, and desire, and keeps asking readers how far they are willing to follow a story as it changes.