I’m Anna Hawthorne, a Dutch author who writes dark fantasy novels. I’ve always been drawn to the kind of stories that feel like stepping through a doorway.

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I was born and raised in the Netherlands, and I still live here, sharing my home with a small, chaotic menagerie: two cats, Leliana and Gomez, and three chickens, Rosie, Daisy, and Poppy.

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I had to say goodbye to my cat Remy in May 2025 after he was hit by a car. Losing him left a hole that didn’t neatly close, and maybe never will. Later in 2025, Gomez became part of the family, and with him came that strange, gentle reminder that love doesn’t replace what you lost. It just finds new ways to exist beside it.

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Before I ever tried to build worlds of my own, I lived in other people’s worlds. I grew up devouring The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings, then Harry Potter, and later sank into longer, deeper rabbit holes like The Wheel of Time, Mistborn, The Stormlight Archive, and Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy. I’ve always loved the feeling of leaving ordinary life behind for a while.

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Writing has been part of me for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I even won a local writing competition we joined with our class. Then life did what life does: schoolwork, friends, and the usual noise took over, and the writing dimmed. Not gone. Just quieter. The spark stayed tucked away, waiting.

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During COVID, I finally started playing Dungeons & Dragons, something I’d wanted to do for ages, and that spark came roaring back. Suddenly there were too many characters in my head, too many backstories, too many possibilities. And since there’s no universe where I’ll ever get to play them all, they did the next best thing: they found their way onto the page. A lot of the characters I write began as a concept at the table, sharpened by dice rolls and bad decisions.

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When I’m not writing, I’m usually doing one of three things: raiding bookstores with my best friend, puttering around my little garden growing fruits and vegetables, or showing up every Saturday to play D&D with a group of people I’m genuinely lucky to have.

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That’s me, in the simplest form: someone who loves dark worlds, complicated characters, and the kind of story you can disappear into when real life gets too loud.