Diana Gabaldon

Diana Gabaldon is an Arizona-based author whose genre-blending Outlander novels sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. Gabaldon was born and raised in Arizona, having grown up in Flagstaff where her father Tony Gabaldon was a prominent state senator, and initially set out on a career in science. She earned her B.S. in Zoology from the University of Northern Arizona, in addition to post-graduate degrees in Behavioral Ecology and Marine Biology.

After her graduate studies were complete, Gabaldon embarked on a career in academia. She never strayed far from her home state, however, and took a position teaching anatomy at Arizona State University, where she would remain throughout the majority of the 1980s.

Throughout her tenure at Arizona State, Gabaldon also started to write and publish science articles for popular magazines, as well as comic books that featured Disney's iconic Scrooge McDuck character. Gabaldon's burgeoning interest in the written word ultimately led her to take a stab at writing a novel. She did it on a whim, never suspecting that anything would come of her novel-in-progress, but still managed to post a few chapters to a primitive Internet forum in the early 1990s devoted to Literature.

Although unfinished at the time, Gabaldon's work-in-progress sparked the attention of science fiction author John E. Stith. Stith was so impressed with Gabaldon's time-travel-focused work, that he helped her land a literary agent. A book deal soon followed, with her very first novel, Outlander, published in 1991.

Over the course of the next two decades, seven more Outlander novels were published, including 2014's Written in My Own Heart's Blood. The novels were known for blending several different genres, including romance, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy, and became hugely successful both in the United States and abroad.

By the early 2010s, Gabaldon's Outlander novels had been published in over two dozen countries and translated into 24 different languages, making them one of the most successful book series of the 21st century. Due to the overwhelming international success of the books, in 2014 a screen adaptation of the novels appeared on the premium cable channel Starz.

"Outlander" (Starz 2014), starring Caitriona Balfe and Sam Heughan, debuted on the Starz network in August of that year.