Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough (1937-2015) was an Australian author best known internationally for The Thorn Birds, a multigenerational family saga that became a publishing phenomenon and one of the best-selling novels of the twentieth century, later adapted into a hugely popular 1983 American television miniseries. Within historical fiction specifically, she is equally celebrated for the Masters of Rome series, seven meticulously researched novels tracing the fall of the Roman Republic from the rise of Gaius Marius through Julius Caesar's assassination and its aftermath.

Before her writing career, McCullough worked as a neuroscientist and researcher, including years at Yale University's medical school studying the electrical structure of the brain -- a scientific rigor she carried directly into the historical research underpinning Masters of Rome, which she wrote with source material and maps developed almost as if for a graduate thesis. She continued writing prolifically into her later years despite failing eyesight, working with assistants to keep producing new fiction.

A new reader interested in Roman history should start with The First Man in Rome, the opening volume of Masters of Rome; a reader wanting her best-known work should start with The Thorn Birds instead. Both remain in print internationally decades after their original publication.