Diana Gabaldon is an American author best known for the Outlander novels, in which Claire Randall, a twentieth-century nurse, travels back in time to eighteenth-century Scotland and falls in love with the Highland warrior Jamie Fraser. The series began with “Outlander” in 1991, now runs to nine novels, and had sold more than 50 million copies worldwide by 2021.
Gabaldon was born in Williams, Arizona, in 1952 and grew up in Flagstaff, the daughter of Tony Gabaldon, an Arizona state senator. She holds a degree in zoology and a doctorate in behavioural ecology from Northern Arizona University, and a master’s in marine biology from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She spent twelve years at Arizona State University, where her field was scientific computation, founded the journal “Science Software Quarterly” in 1984, and also wrote comic book scripts for Disney.
In 1988 she began a novel purely for practice, with no intention of showing it to anyone. A rerun of “Doctor Who” featuring a young Scot from around 1745 suggested the setting and her hero. An excerpt posted on the CompuServe Literary Forum led to an introduction to the literary agent Perry Knowlton and a three-book deal. The novel was published as “Outlander” in the United States and as “Cross Stitch” in the United Kingdom, and won the Romance Writers of America’s RITA Award for Best Romance of 1991. Gabaldon left her university post after finishing the second book.
The Lord John Grey books follow a secondary character from the main series through three novels and several novellas. They are historical mysteries set between 1756 and 1761. “A Breath of Snow and Ashes” (2005) entered the New York Times hardcover fiction list at number one and won a Quill Award. Gabaldon also adapted part of the first novel as the graphic novel “The Exile” (2010), and “Seven Stones to Stand or Fall” (2017) collects seven of her novellas.
The television adaptation, starring Caitríona Balfe and Sam Heughan, ran on Starz for eight seasons from 2014 to 2026. Gabaldon worked on it as a consultant and wrote several episodes. A prequel series, “Outlander: Blood of My Blood”, began in 2025. The ninth novel, “Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone”, was published in 2021. Gabaldon is still writing the tenth and final book, “A Blessing for a Warrior Going Out”, which has no publication date. She lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Publication Order of Outlander Books
| Outlander / Cross Stitch | 1991 |
| Dragonfly in Amber | 1992 |
| Voyager | 1993 |
| Drums of Autumn | 1996 |
| The Fiery Cross | 2001 |
| A Breath of Snow and Ashes | 2005 |
| An Echo in the Bone | 2009 |
| Written in My Own Heart’s Blood | 2014 |
| Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone | 2021 |
Publication Order of Lord John Grey Books
| Lord John and the Private Matter | 2003 |
| Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade | 2007 |
| Lord John and the Hand of Devils | 2007 |
| The Scottish Prisoner | 2011 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| Lord John and the Hellfire Club | 1998 |
| Lord John and the Succubus | 2003 |
| Lord John and the Haunted Soldier | 2007 |
| The Custom of the Army | 2010 |
| A Leaf on the Wind of All Hallows | 2010 |
| Lord John and the Plague of Zombies / A Plague of Zombies | 2011 |
| The Space Between | 2013 |
| Virgins | 2013 |
| A Fugitive Green | 2017 |
| Besieged | 2017 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| A Trail of Fire | 2012 |
| Seven Stones to Stand or Fall | 2017 |
Publication Order of Graphic Novels
| The Exile: An Outlander Graphic Novel | 2010 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| The Outlandish Companion | 1999 |
| The Outlandish Companion Volume Two | 2015 |
| “I Give You My Body...”: How I Write Sex Scenes | 2016 |
Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).