Nan Hunt was educated in Bathurst where she wrote for the children's pages of her school newspaper. She worked as a stenographer in the office of a Bathurst department store from 1935 to 1943. She was a clerk with the Air Force (WAAF) from 1943 to 1946 when was stationed in Melbourne. Hunt then worked as a secretary from 1946 to 1967 in Sydney. She married Walter Gibbs Hunt and returned to Bathurst in 1968. After her husband's death in 1975, she helped her step-son run their Bathurst property for a few years then took up writing full time.
Nan Hunt's writing appeared on the children's page of the Sydney Sun and the Melbourne Leader when she was 11 years old. She later wrote for the women's page of the Sydney Morning Herald, had short stories published in the Woman's Mirror, and verse, articles and paragraphs in the Sydney Bulletin. From 1963 Hunt wrote for the New South Wales Department of Education's School Magazine. At the urging of the then editor of the School Magazine, Patricia Wrightson, Hunt wrote her first children's novel The Everywhere Dog (1978) drawing upon her experiences with her nine grandchildren, her favourite dog and her penchant for driving assorted motor vehicles.