Hayley Scrivenor Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Hayley Scrivenor is a literary fiction author that is best known for her debut fiction work “Dirt Creek,” which was first published in 2022.

The author was born in the regional center of Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. This is right in the middle of canola and wheat country and she still remembers having to hold her breath because canola stank when it was flowering.
She also remembers the cold winters and hot summers and the remote place she lived in that was many miles from the nearest city.

As a kid, the family moved around a lot but between the ages of six and twelve. She would then live in a small country town near Wagga Wagga. She tries not to say the name of the town as she believes it was not their fault that she would grow up and end up a writer.
In fact, the stories of many of the characters in her debut work including Esther Bianchi are not autobiographical. Nonetheless, she does believe the small town left a huge imprint on her as the remote physical isolation was something she always wanted to explore.
It is also not accidental that her lead characters in Dirt Creek are twelve years or younger. It turns out that Hayley Scrivenor was twelve when she left Wagga Wagga and moved to a bigger city on the coast.

Unlike many authors, Hayley Scrivenor never grew up with the desire to become an author. She always believed that people were just born writers or they had to get some letter from an authority before they started writing.
Of course, she now realizes, that being an author is an ongoing work and knows she needs to find ways of giving herself permission to do all manner of things to further her craft.

As a kid, she often felt a bit on the loose end as she always wanted to learn and be good at something but just could not figure out what that was.

When she went to college, she initially believed she loved languages. As such, she studied Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and French in her undergrad studies.

She has now lost much of the knowledge about those languages that she was taught but she believes they were a great way to spend her time, as she figured out what she really loved to do.
It was during this time that she realized she wanted to become an author and be really good at it. She has said that she was willing to sit down and be awful, as long as she constantly improved.

Before Hayley Scrivenor made it big with “Dirt Creek,” she had several stories published, even as she completed her doctoral studies.

She initially began writing her work with a very different project in mind. She had gotten stuck trying to flesh out her first idea and so she pivoted to write a short work on the children living in a small country town and their experiences walking back home from school.
Hayley always had an interest in collective narration as these were usually the type of works she loved. Once she started writing that children’s short story, the writing just flowed as all the details of the small town she had lived in came flooding back.
She started thinking that if the kids were talking to each other, they would need to have a reason for that communication. It was from this acknowledgment that she had the idea of the missing girl.

She made the decision to make the core of the book the absence of the girl. While the work has gone on to become a blockbuster bestseller, she is still surprised at how enmeshed and specific it feels with her experiences growing up in small-town Australia.
Initially published in New Zealand, it has now been published in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States given its broader appeal.

Hayley Scrivenor has said that she never imagined she would become a crime fiction novelist. She believed it would be all about descriptions of childhood experiences. What she learned is that she found a lot of satisfaction in the kinds of plots usually classified as crime fiction.

As for her inspiration, she has said that it depends on the stage in which she is writing. When she is in the first draft stages, she loves reading maximalists such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Hanya Yanigiharsa, Michelle de Kretser, and Donna Tartt.
She always likes not only the level of detail and the language in their works but also their overall plots which always make her excited.

When she is thinking more structurally, she loves to read taut fiction which pays a lot of attention to minute details where one can get answers they would not necessarily get in real life.
Some of the authors she reads during such periods include Tana French, Jane Harper, and Garry Disher.

Hayley is also a voracious reader of nonfiction in a variety of subjects she is interested in.

Hayley Scrivenor’s “Dirt Creek” is the story of Esther, a twelve-year-old girl who lives in a small town in rural Australia. The girl goes missing while on her way home from school, throwing the small community into a maelstrom of grief and suspicion.
Sarah Michaels is the Detective Sergeant who is put in charge of the case. She arrives during one of the hottest springs in a generation to work on the case alongside Ronnie her best friend who is just as determined to crack the case.
Ronnie’s school friend Lewis informs her that he had seen the kid with a strange man the afternoon she had gone missing. She believes that they are closer to finding the kid but Lewis refuses to talk to the cops.
Ronnie believes there are several people that may be lying about how much information they have about what happened to Esther.

Spiced up with a Greek chorus, the work gives voice to the children of the town as it explores ties that bind, even though we often try to leave them behind.

Nonetheless, it never loses sight of the question of what happened to the preteen and the effect this has on the town.