Diana Gabaldon is an American author most well known for her blockbuster Outlander historical romance fantasy series. She was raised in Flagstaff, Arizona and pursued the sciences before turning to writing fiction. She has a Bachelor of Science in Zoology and a Masters of Science in Marine Biology from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and a Ph.D. in Quantitative Behavioral Ecology.Â
She spent several years working at the University of Pennsylvania and “wrote comic books (freelance) for Walt Disney for a year or two in the late 1970′s—while holding a post-doc in marine biology at UCLA.” She was a professor at Arizona State for around twelve years in the Center for Environmental Studies. During that time, she was at the forefront of scientific omputation (the use of computers to do scientific research). She jokes that “All I can say about that is that it’s pretty easy to be an expert, if there are only six people in the world who do what you do, and that was my position at the time.” During her years in academia, she wrote numerous scientific articles, textbooks, and edited scientific journals.
When she decided to write a novel in 1988 she did so in secret from her family and for herself to “practice, just to learn how.” She said, “I had two full-time jobs and three children under the age of six, so I don’t want anyone telling me they don’t have time to write a book, but I learned to work in the middle of the night, and I still do that.” (Collider)
She thought she would try historical fiction because she knew her way around a library. “It seems easier to look things up than to make them up. If it turned out I had no imagination, I could steal things from the historical record,” she told The Scots Magazine.
Her decision to set the book in Scotland came about thanks to a TV rerun of Doctor Who. She said, “I was just looking for a time and place in which to set a historical novel because I wanted to practise writing one. I wasn’t going to show it to anyone, let alone get it published, so it didn’t really matter where I set it. I saw this young man in a kilt and thought that was quite fetching, so why not Scotland in the 18th century?” It was Doctor Who episode “The War Games” that inspired her main character Jamie Fraser. She decided to have “an Englishwoman to play off all these kilted Scotsmen,” but her female character “took over the story and began telling it herself, making smart-ass modern remarks about everything.”
Diana posted a short excerpt of her novel on the CompuServe Literary Forum, where it caught the eye of author John E. Stith, who introduced her to a literary agent. She landed a book deal for a trilogy. By the time she finished her second book, she resigned her faculty position at Arizona State University to become a full-time author.
The Outlander books have been adapted into a popular TV series on which Diana serves as a co-producer and adviser. Diana’s books have sold millons of copies and are sold in over 100 countries and have been published in over 38 languages.
Diana currently lives in Scottsdale, Arizona with her husband, a number of pets, and “a lot of uninvited wildlife.” They have three adult children and two grandchildren.
