Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough was an Australian author, raised in Sydney, who trained as a neurophysiologist and spent her early career working in hospitals and universities in Australia and abroad. In 1974, while working as a research assistant at the Yale School of Medicine, she published her first novel. She died in 2015. Her second novel, The Thorn Birds, published in 1977, became an international bestseller and sold more than thirty million copies worldwide. Soon afterward she moved to Norfolk Island, where she lived for the rest of her life, and she wrote a total of twenty-five novels in genres including romance, mystery and historical fiction.