photo: Paul Leonard
About my writing...My novels are often inspired by true crimes, but at the heart of each story, I am writing about families: their secrets, their tragedies, and the powerful, complicated bonds of blood. All of my work is set in the Midwest and the Ozarks, where I was raised.
Laura McHugh is the award-winning, internationally-bestselling author of novels The Weight of Blood, Arrowood, The Wolf Wants In, What's Done in Darkness, and Safe and Sound. The Weight of Blood won the International Thriller Writers Award and the Silver Falchion Award for Best First Novel and the Missouri Author Award for Fiction, and was named a Best Book of the Year by BookPage, the Kansas City Star, and the Sunday Times in the UK. Arrowood was a finalist for the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Novel, The Wolf Wants In was named a Best Book of the Year by Library Journal, and What's Done in Darkness won the Missouri Literary Award. McHugh’s work has also been nominated for an American Library Association Alex Award, a Barry Award, a GoodReads Choice Award, and a Pushcart Prize. McHugh lives in Missouri with her family.
A little more about me...I grew up in small towns in Iowa and Missouri, the youngest of eight kids, and I've been writing stories all my life, but a career as a writer never seemed like a real possibility. A first-generation college student, I earned an English degree, but then went on to get degrees in more "practical" fields—computer science and library & information science—and worked as a software developer for ten years, most of that time in the basement of an insurance company. When I was pregnant with my second child, I was laid off from my job, and that's when I decided to write a novel. It seemed like a crazy thing to do under the circumstances, but I knew I would regret it if I never tried. That novel became The Weight of Blood.