Colleen McCullough eBooks

Australian author Colleen McCullough was born in 1937. Her family was nomadic during her childhood, eventually settling in Sydney, where she currently lives.

McCullough has had a few careers before becoming a full-time writer. She has worked as a teacher and journalist, and was training to be a medical doctor. An allergy to surgical soap forced her to divert her educational path, and McCullough instead became a neuroscientist.

As a neuroscientist, she helped set up the neurophysiology department of the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney. She also worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. While working as a researcher at Yale, she wrote her first two books.

When these books, 1974’sTim and 1977’s The Thorn Birds, were successful, McCullough was able to focus entirely on writing. She moved to Norfolk Island in the South Pacific, where she still spends part of her time.

She has written over twenty additional books, including an autobiography, novels and the Masters of Rome series. This series of historical fiction earned her a Doctor of Letters from Macquarie University in 1993 because of the depth of her research.

McCullough has had popular and critical success, but has also seen significant amounts of controversy. Her 2008 novel, The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet, was a re-imagining of the characters in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The Jane Austen Society of Australia and similar groups criticised the book, but it was well-received by critics.