About Diana Gabaldon

Diana Gabaldon was born in Arizona in 1952, has a PhD in behavioral ecology, and worked as a scientific editor before writing Outlander as practice — she has said she never intended to publish it. Her editor found the manuscript and disagreed with that assessment. Outlander was published in 1991 and became one of the most devoted fandoms in genre fiction. The series now runs to nine full-length novels, all of them very long, with an untitled tenth planned as the finale. The Starz television adaptation, which ran from 2014 to 2023, introduced the series to millions of new readers worldwide.

The Outlander series defies simple genre categorization. It's historical fiction (set primarily in 18th-century Scotland and colonial America), it's time-travel romance, it's war fiction, it's a portrait of a long marriage tested by impossible circumstances. The central relationship between Claire Randall, a 1940s nurse who travels through standing stones to 18th-century Scotland, and Jamie Fraser is one of the most fully realized love stories in popular fiction. Gabaldon writes at enormous length and rewards that length — these are books to inhabit, not rush through.