Olivia Hawker Books in Order

Olivia Hawker is the pen name of American novelist Libbie Grant, a writer whose historical fiction often starts with ordinary people under pressure. Her stories move from wartime Germany to frontier Wyoming, Depression-era Kentucky, and the American West, with family history, faith, and hard choices often close at hand.

Grant grew up between the Seattle area and eastern Idaho. After her parents divorced, she spent school years with her mother in Seattle and summers in rural Idaho with her father. Those two landscapes stayed with her. The Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain country both shaped the places she returns to on the page.

Her childhood split left her comfortable with both a busy city and expansive rural country, a contrast that later became useful material for fiction.

She was raised Mormon on her father's side of the family, though she no longer practices religion. Questions of belief, community, duty, and individual freedom turn up repeatedly in her books, not as easy answers, but as pressures her characters have to live with.

Writing was the plan early on. Her parents encouraged art rather than treating it as a hobby, and her father and grandfather both worked as painters. Grant did not attend college, in part because her family could not afford it and she did not want to take on debt for a writing degree. Instead, she taught herself and kept working toward a full-time career.

She built it the long way.

Under the Olivia Hawker name, The Ragged Edge of Night arrived in 2018. It follows Anton Starzmann, a former Franciscan friar who becomes involved in German resistance to the Nazis, and it grew from the story of her husband's grandfather. The novel set a pattern for Hawker's work: history at a human scale, moral stakes, and people trying to hold on to decency.

Her next novels range widely in place and period. One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow heads to 1876 Wyoming, where two families must survive after violence tears them apart. The Rise of Light shifts to 1970s Idaho and a controlling father, while The Fire and the Ore follows three women tied together in a plural marriage during the Utah War. In October in the Earth, a preacher's wife leaves Depression-era Kentucky by freight train and learns the difficult rules of life on the rails.

The setting changes. The struggle for a self-directed life doesn't.

Hawker also writes as Libbie Hawker and Libbie Grant, with each name used for different parts of her work. Across the names, readers can expect historical settings, intimate family knots, and characters whose choices have real costs. She has been a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the WILLA Literary Award.

She now lives in British Columbia, Canada, while keeping close ties to the Pacific Northwest and the San Juan Islands. That attachment to weather, land, and regional history is easy to feel in the novels, where a household, a town, or a wide stretch of country can change the course of a life.