American · b. 1969
Elin Hilderbrand is an American novelist known as the "Queen of the Beach Read," the author of more than thirty novels published almost yearly since 2000, most set on Nantucket, Massachusetts, where she has lived since the early 1990s. Born in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, she studied creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her breakout came with The Beach Club (2000), and she went on to bestseller-list fixtures including the Winter Street series and The Perfect Couple, adapted as a Netflix series in 2024. In 2025 she departed from her usual solo, Nantucket-set fiction to co-write The Academy with her daughter Shelby Cunningham, the first book in a new series set at a New England boarding school. Hilderbrand has sold millions of copies worldwide and publishes with Little, Brown and Company.