- His brother Robert Hiaasen, journalist, editor and Sunday feature columnist at the Capital Gazette was killed by gunfire in that newspaper attack in Annapolis on 28 June 2018.
- For most of his adult life, he lived in a stilt house in the Florida Keys. Rather than drive to the Miami Herald building in Miami, he communicates with Herald headquarters by phone, fax, and modem.
- Hiaasen grew up in Plantation, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale that was, at the time, the westernmost fringe of civilization in south Florida, literally on the edge of the Everglades. As he watched Florida being settled by thousands of newcomers every year and watched his beloved background turn into asphalt, he began to write furious diatribes about the destruction of the Florida wilderness. Hiaasen based his popular fictional character, Clinton "Skink" Tyree, on his boyhood friend Clyde Ingalls, who committed suicide at the age of 17, partly in grief about the devastation of his homeland.
- His last name is pronounced HI-uh-suhn.
- Wears a fishing hat and noise-suppression earmuffs while writing.
- His stepson was one of the first people to read Christopher Paolini's novel Eragon, and brought it to the attention of Random House, which inspired them to republish the novel and place it into wide circulation.
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