Hazel Gaynor author page

Hazel Gaynor biography

Hazel Gaynor is an award-winning historical novelist whose books explore events and lives shaped by twentieth-century history. Her debut novel, The Girl Who Came Home, was initially self-published in 2012 before being acquired by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, and republished in 2014. It became a New York Times and USA Today bestseller and won the Romantic Novelists’ Association Historical Novel of the Year award in 2015.

The Girl Who Came Home was inspired by the Addergoole Fourteen, a group of emigrants from County Mayo who travelled aboard the Titanic in 1912. The novel follows seventeen-year-old Maggie Murphy as she leaves Ireland for America and survives the sinking, alongside a later storyline involving her great-granddaughter Grace.

Gaynor’s other historical novels include A Memory of Violets, The Girl from the Savoy, The Cottingley Secret, The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter, The Bird in the Bamboo Cage and The Last Lifeboat. The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter was shortlisted for the Historical Writers’ Association Gold Crown in 2019, while The Last Lifeboat was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award in 2023.

She has also co-written historical novels with Heather Webb, including Last Christmas in Paris, Meet Me in Monaco and Three Words for Goodbye. Her novel Before Dorothy, published by HarperFiction in the UK and Berkley in the US in 2025, imagines the earlier life of Emily Gale, the aunt who raises Dorothy in L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories.