Born and raised near Edinburgh in the small village of Longniddry, her final years were spent in Inverness.
[3] Hunter's debut was Patrick Kentigern Keenan, published by Blackie and Son in 1963 with illustrations by Charles Keeping.
For The Stronghold Mollie Hunter won the 1974 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject.
[6] The same novel, published in The Netherlands as "Een toren tegen de romeinen" won the "Zilveren Griffel" (Silver Pen) award in 1978 for children's writing.
She won the Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association in 1992, recognising A Sound of Chariots (1972) as the best children's book published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award.