About Colleen McCullough
Colleen McCullough (; 1 June 1937 – 29 January 2015) was an Australian author. Raised in Sydney, she trained as a neurophysiologist and spent her early career working at hospitals and universities in Australia and overseas. In 1974, while working as a research assistant at the Yale School of Medicine, she published her first novel Tim. Her second novel, The Thorn Birds, was published in 1977 and became an international bestseller. It sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and was adapted into a successful television miniseries. Soon after the release of The Thorn Birds, McCullough moved to Norfolk Island where she spent the remainder of her life. McCullough wrote a total of 25 novels over the course of her career, in genres including romance, mystery, and historical fiction. A writer of popular fiction, her novels were commercially successful but attracted relatively little attention from literary scholars and critics. She was named one of Australia's 100 National Living Treasures in 1997 and was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2006. She died on Norfolk Island in 2015. The paperback rights to the novel were sold at auction to Avon Books for a record-setting US$1.9 million (equivalent to $10,090,000 in 2025) in 1977. While working at Yale, McCullough wrote her first novel Tim in an attempt to supplement her income. McCullough published The First Man in Rome, the first book in her Masters of Rome series of historical fiction set in Ancient Rome, in 1990.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.