Colleen Margaretta McCullough (born in 1937) was an Australian neuroscientist and author known for her novels, her most well-known being The Thorn Birds and The Ladies of Missalonghi.
Before starting university, McCullough earned a living as a teacher, librarian and journalist. In her first year of medical studies at the University of Sydney she suffered dermatitis from surgical soap and was told to abandon her dreams of becoming a medical doctor. Instead, she switched to neuroscience and worked at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney.
In 1963, McCullough moved for four years to the United Kingdom; at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London she met the chairman of the neurology department at Yale University who offered her a research associate job at Yale. She spent 10 years (April 1967 to 1976) researching and teaching in the Department of Neurology at the Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. While at Yale she wrote her first two books. One of these, The Thorn Birds, became an international bestseller and one of the best selling books in history, with sales of over 30 million copies worldwide, that in 1983 inspired one of the most-watched television miniseries of all time. The success of her novels enabled her to give up research and by the late 1970s had settled in Norfolk Island, Australia
She died in 2015
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