Diana
Gabaldon is the author of the award-winning, NYT-bestselling Outlander
novels, described by Salon magazine as "the smartest historical sci-fi
adventure-romance story ever written by a science Ph.D. with a
background in scripting "Scrooge McDuck" comics."
The adventure
began in 1991 with the classic Outlander ("historical fiction with a
Moebius twist"), continued through five more New York Times-bestselling
novels--Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross,
and A Breath of Snow and Ashes--and a nonfiction (well, relatively)
companion volume, The Outlandish Companion, which provides copious
details on the settings, background, characters, research, and writing
of the novels. Gabaldon (it's pronounced "GAH-bull-dohn"-rhymes with
"stone") has also written two historical mysteries, Lord John and the
Private Matter, and Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, as well
as several novellas featuring Lord John Grey (which will appear in
volume form this November, as Lord John and the Hand of Devils).
In
addition, she is working on a contemporary mystery series, set in
Phoenix, and has written Highly Scholarly Introductions (with masses of
footnotes) to recent Modern Library editions of Sir Walter Scott's
Invahoe, and Thomas Paine's Common Sense.
A Breath of Snow and
Ashes, the most recent novel in the main Outlander series, opened
simultaneously at #1 on the bestseller lists of four countries, and won
both a Quill Award and the Corine interntational literary prize for
fiction.
Dr. Gabaldon holds three degrees in science: Zoology,
Marine Biology, and Quantitative Behavioral Ecology, (plus an honorary
degree as Doctor of Humane Letters (though no one has yet explained to
her just what a humane letter is) and spent a dozen years as a
university professor with an expertise in scientific computation before
beginning to write fiction. She has written scientific articles and
textbooks, worked as an editor on the MacMillan Encyclopedia of
Computers, founded the scientific-computation journal Science Software
Quarterly, and has written numerous comic-book scripts for Walt Disney.
None of this has anything whatever to do with her novels, but there it
is.
