Book Stack

Erin Hunter is a collective pseudonym used by the authors Kate Cary, Cherith Baldry, Gillian Philip, Inbali Iserles, and Tui Sutherland, along with editor Victoria Holmes, in the writing of the Warriors, Seekers and Survivors book series. Each of the authors play a different role: while Holmes creates the storyline of each book, Cary, Baldry, and Sutherland take turns writing the books. Sutherland joined In addition, another person who is not an Erin Hunter writes the manga: Dan Jolley. The newest addition to the group is Inbali Iserles, who writes Survivors under the pseudonym as well.

In 2003, HarperCollins asked Victoria Holmes to write a fantasy series about feral cats, but, not being a reader of fantasy, she was less than enthusiastic. After writing one storyline, Kate Cary was brought in to write the book as Holmes went behind the scenes to supervise details and edit the book. Then on the third book, Forest of Secrets, Cherith Baldry joined Erin Hunter. Later, after Sutherland wrote the first Warriors field guide, she became the fourth Erin Hunter.

The name Erin Hunter was chosen for a few reasons. First, if the authors used all of their own names, the books would be placed in different places in a library, making them hard to find. Second, they were trying to pick a surname that would place the books very close to the Redwall series by Brian Jacques, which was, at the time, the book series with the closest plot to Warriors. One of the authors suggested "Hunter", and the others found that it was "perfect" because not only did it place the book series close to Jacques, but it evokes the image of a cat. One of Victoria Holmes's favorite given names is Erin, and it was accepted for being a strong, Celtic name and "not particularly girly".