Karen Hawkins

Karen Hawkins is an American author and New York Times and USA Today bestselling novelist best known for Scottish-set historical romance, including long-running series built around Highland lairds, clan politics and marriage-of-convenience plots. Her books are frequently noted for their comic touch, pairing the genre's expected period romance with broader humor than much of the field, and she has written both single-title Regency and Scottish historical romances as well as connected family series. Hawkins is one of the contributors to the Lady Whistledown continuity novels — The Further Observations of Lady Whistledown and Lady Whistledown Strikes Back — anthology-format books built around Julia Quinn's gossip-columnist device from her Bridgerton series, with each participating author writing a novella-length entry set inside the same Regency London and sharing the Whistledown framing device. Hawkins contributed alongside Quinn, Suzanne Enoch and Mia Ryan. Across her career Hawkins has published widely within Avon and other major romance imprints, and her Scottish historical romances in particular have remained a consistent throughline connecting much of her broader bibliography, distinguishing her within a Regency-dominated subgenre.