Home

Elaine Knighton

Elaine has always been horse-crazy. As a child she carried buckets of water to her imaginary steeds, rode piles of pillows and drew picture after picture of galloping horses. Her dream of owning a horse finally came true at age 15 with Haahdam, a purebred Arabian. Nearly all her time and energy went toward her horse, and as a result, she never did get into much trouble as a teenager. When she wasn't wandering the hills, she was at home reading or dragging large oak branches into her room to simulate the forest outside Camelot.

One of her first jobs was as a barn girl at a major hunter-jumper-dressage training center, where for up to 12 hours a day, six days a week, she mucked out stalls, fed the show horses, groomed and saddled school horses, took lessons and cleaned tack. She developed some impressive biceps as well as calluses! Living with horses gave Elaine a variety of invaluable experiences that she draws upon for her novels.

In college she learned fencing from a French master, became a certified scuba diver, learned to repair small engines, draw blood, culture bacteria and slice frozen tissue with a microtome. After getting a degree in biological technology, she went on to become a fine arts major at the University of Washington.

Although she has won awards for her watercolors and sold paintings and drawings, music has also been a major love of her life. Having played the violin since childhood, she later taught herself fingerpicking on her steel-string guitar.

Elaine then discovered Celtic music, and her violin was transformed into a fiddle by virtue of her obsession with traditional Irish and Scottish tunes. She keeps in practice by playing in a group at a local pub once a week, and has studied with the renowned fiddler Alasdair Fraser at the Gaelic College of Sabhal Mór Ostaig on the Isle of Skye.

When things medieval sparked her imagination, the urge to write grabbed hold of her. One manuscript evolved, then another, and eventually her body of work gained the attention of the Harlequin Historicals editors.