Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCullough was an Australian author known for her novels, her most well-known being The Thorn Birds and The Ladies of Missalonghi. She was born in Wellington, New South Wales on 1 June 1937, the daughter of James and Laurie McCullough. She had a younger brother, Carl, who drowned in 1965. She attended Holy Cross College, Woollahra and had a strong interest in both science and the humanities. She worked as a teacher, librarian and journalist before studying medicine at the University of Sydney. She suffered from dermatitis and had to abandon her dream of becoming a doctor. She switched to neuroscience and worked at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney. In 1963, she moved to the United Kingdom and joined the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. She met the chairman of the neurology department at Yale University who offered her a research associate job at Yale. She spent 10 years researching and teaching in the Department of Neurology at the Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. While at Yale she wrote her first two books: Tim (1974), a novel about the relationship between a middle-aged woman and a young man with intellectual disability; and The Thorn Birds (1977), a sweeping saga of three generations of an Australian family that became an international bestseller and one of the best selling books in history, with sales of over 30 million copies worldwide. The Thorn Birds was also adapted into a television miniseries in 1983 that became one of the most-watched miniseries of all time. McCullough returned to Australia in 1976 and settled on Norfolk Island, a self-governing territory of Australia. She continued to write novels in various genres, including historical fiction, fantasy, romance, crime and science fiction. Her most ambitious work was the Masters of Rome series (1990-2007), a seven-volume fictionalized account of the life and times of Julius Caesar and his contemporaries, based on extensive research and historical sources. The series was praised for its accuracy, detail and vivid portrayal of ancient Rome. McCullough also wrote The Ladies of Missalonghi (1987), a novel set in the Blue Mountains that was accused of plagiarism by L.M. Montgomery's heirs; An Indecent Obsession (1981), a novel about a psychiatric ward in World War II that was adapted into a film in 1985; Morgan's Run (2000), a novel about the First Fleet and the founding of Australia; The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet (2008), a sequel to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice; Bittersweet (2013), a novel about four sisters who become nurses in the 1920s; and The Courage and the Will (2014), an autobiography that was published posthumously. McCullough received several awards and honours for her contribution to literature and culture, such as the Order of Australia (AO) in 1984, the Doctor of Letters from Macquarie University in 1993, the Doctor of Letters from Charles Sturt University in 2002, the Doctor of Letters from University of New England in 2004, the Centenary Medal in 2003, and the Commander of the Order of Saint Gregory by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006. She also established a legacy fund for Norfolk Island to support its health care system. She married Ric Robinson, an islander and former Pitcairn descendant, in 1984 and had no children. She suffered from various health problems, including diabetes, osteoporosis, macular degeneration and kidney failure. She died on 29 January 2015 at the age of 77 at her home on Norfolk Island.