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ERIN
HART
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.
Read selected interviews
PADDY
O'BRIEN
Since
Erin is often accompanied by
her husband, accordion player Paddy O'Brien, we thought it might be a
good idea
to put Paddy's biography on the website too...
A
product of County Offaly in the
midlands of Ireland, Paddy O’Brien is regarded by serious players and
collectors of Irish traditional music as one of the tradition’s most
important
repositories; in a musical career that spans nearly forty years, he has
collected more than 3,000 compositions—jigs, reels, hornpipes, airs,
and marches,
including many rare and unusual tunes. His mastery of the two-row
button
accordion was also acknowledged through prestigious awards: he was
named
Oireachtas champion four times, and All-Ireland senior accordion
champion in
1975. In Ireland, he played and recorded with the famed Castle Ceili
Band and
Ceoltoiri Laighean.
In
1978, Paddy began playing
regularly in the United States, in Washington D.C., Saint Louis, Saint
Paul,
San Francisco, Boston, New York, and many places between. He has been
featured
on three recordings with Shanachie Records since 1978, and in 1988
released his
first solo album, Stranger at the Gate, on the Green Linnet label.
Paddy has
taught at the prestigious Willie Clancy Summer School held in Milltown
Malbay,
County Clare, and has served as a master artist in the Minnesota State
Arts
Board Folk Arts Apprenticeship Program.
In
the fall of 1994, Paddy received a
$6,500 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to record and
annotate
500 reels and jigs from his vast repertoire of traditional tunes; the
result of
that effort, The Paddy OBrien Tune
Collection: A Personal Treasury of Irish Jigs and Reels, has
received accolades from players of Irish music around the world. He
currently
plays and tours internationally with Chulrua,
a trio
with fiddler Patrick Ourceau and guitarist and singer Pat Egan. He also
plays
locally around the Upper Midwest with an eight-piece ensemble, The Doon Ceili
Band.
How to set up a reading with
Irish traditional music...
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