McCullough, Colleen (1937-2015), an Australian author, wrote the international best-selling novel The Thorn Birds (1977). The story portrays several generations of an Australian family living on a sheep station (ranch). The action extends to three continents and covers almost 100 years. The novel was adapted into a popular 10-part television series in 1983.
McCullough began her writing career with the novel Tim (1974), a love story about a romance between a young man with mental retardation and an older career woman. An Indecent Obsession (1981) is set in a ward in an Army hospital in the South Pacific near the end of World War II (1939-1945).
McCullough wrote a series of novels about life in ancient Rome during the later decades of the Roman Republic through the early reign of Caesar Augustus. The series, called Masters of Rome, is noted for its careful research and its vision of the complexities of an expanding empire. The series consists of The First Man in Rome (1990), The Grass Crown (1991), Fortune’s Favorites (1993), Caesar’s Women (1996), Caesar: Let the Dice Fly (1998), The October Horse: A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra (2002), and Antony and Cleopatra (2007).
McCullough’s other novels cover a variety of genres from murder mysteries to science fiction. Her works include A Creed for the Third Millennium (1985), a religious work set in the future; The Ladies of Missalonghi (1987), about a young woman’s love affair in a remote region of Australia; The Song of Troy (1998), a modern retelling of the Trojan War story; Morgan’s Run (2000), about a prison colony in Australia in the 1700’s; The Touch (2003), about the struggles of a young bride in the wilds of Australia; Angel (2005), set in a boarding house in Sydney; and On, Off (2006), about a mass killer in Connecticut. The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet (2008) is a sequel to Pride and Prejudice by the English novelist Jane Austen.
McCullough was born on June 1, 1937, in Wellington, New South Wales, Australia. She was a teacher, library worker, and bus driver before training as a neuroscience researcher in the Department of Neurophysiology at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney from 1958 to 1963. She was an associate in research neurology at the Yale University School of Internal Medicine in the United States from 1967 to 1977. McCullough died on Jan. 29, 2015.
