Hannah Kent Books in Order

If you want the best entry point: Burial Rites
If you want folklore and creeping dread: The Good People
If you want a love story shaped by faith and migration: Devotion
If you want to read in publication order: Burial Rites → The Good People → Devotion

Hannah Kent was born in Adelaide in 1985 and grew up in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia, surrounded by paddocks, trees, and small local communities. She has often spoken about turning to books early, and about a childhood shaped by reading, imagination, and the feel of landscape. Even as a kid, stories were part of daily life. Her father would spin bedtime tales, stop at the most dramatic moment, and leave her to dream up the ending.

Iceland changed everything.

At seventeen, after finishing school, Kent went to northern Iceland as a Rotary exchange student. She arrived in winter, far from home, in a place that felt both strange and magnetic. During that year she heard the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman executed in Iceland, and the story stayed with her. She also began writing more seriously, trying to make sense of the place around her by putting words on the page.

Back in Australia, Kent studied creative writing at Flinders University. What began as a deep fascination with Agnes and nineteenth century Iceland became years of research, archival work, and university writing projects. She returned to Iceland, read widely, and kept following the thread. That long apprenticeship mattered. By the time Burial Rites appeared in 2013, it felt less like a sudden debut than the result of a long obsession finally finding its form.

Burial Rites made her name with readers around the world. Set in 1829, it follows Agnes as she is sent to a remote farm to wait for execution, while rumor, fear, and her own voice battle for space. Many readers come to the book for its true crime roots, but what stays with them is the emotional closeness of it, the stark Icelandic setting, and Kent's interest in what happens when a woman is reduced to a story told by other people. The novel became an international bestseller and was translated widely.

She was never going to be a one book writer.

With The Good People, Kent shifted to rural Ireland in 1825 and explored grief, folk belief, and the dangers of a closed community. The novel brings together a grieving grandmother, a servant girl, and a local healer around a child the village fears may be a changeling. Then came Devotion, set in Prussia and colonial South Australia, where Hanne and Thea move through religious persecution, migration, and a love that refuses to fit the rules around them. The book widens Kent's territory, but it still feels unmistakably hers.

Across these novels, a few things keep returning. Kent is drawn to outsiders, especially women who are watched, judged, or misunderstood. She is interested in old beliefs and the pressure of religion, but also in the everyday texture of work, weather, hunger, and family life. Her historical fiction is rich in research, yet it rarely feels like a history lesson. The past in her books feels close, bodily, and alive.

Kent has also worked beyond the novel. She co-founded the Australian literary journal Kill Your Darlings, has written essays and reviews, and has moved into screenwriting, including the feature film Run Rabbit Run. Her books have also moved toward the screen in adaptation. She now lives and works on Peramangk Country in South Australia, and her writing still seems powered by the same things that set it in motion early on: place, patience, and the stubborn pull of stories that refuse to let go.