Emilie Demant Hansen was born in 1873 to a merchant's family in Selde, by the Limfjord in northern Jutland, Denmark.

It was here on the iron ore train in Swedish Lapland that they met a Sami wolf hunter, Johan Turi (1854–1936).

While male anthropologists had visited this area previously, Demant was the first woman to have lived so closely with the Sámi.

Demant made another ethnographic visit to Sweden in 1910, where she lived in Glen with the South Sami couple Marta and Nils Nilsson.

In 1913, she published Med lapperne i højfjeldet (translation: "With the Lapps in the High Mountains"), an account of Sami customs based on her one-year nomadic travels in 1907–08.

The American translator and editor Barbara Sjoholm began researching Emilie Demant Hatt's life around 2002.

Demant had a close relationship and friendship with the Swedish geologist and chemist Hjalmar Lundbohm whom she met in Jukkasjärvi in 1907.

In September 1911, she married Aage Gudmund Hatt,[12] a professor of cultural geography at the University of Copenhagen.

[1] Two novels by Barbara Sjoholm based on the relationship between Carl Nielsen and Emilie Demant Hatt, Fossil Island and a sequel The Former World, were published in 2015.