Anne McCaffrey

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-08-06

Anne McCaffrey was an American-Irish author of science fiction and fantasy, born April 1, 1926, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she died November 21, 2011, in County Wicklow, Ireland, at age eighty-five. She attended Stuart Hall boarding school in Virginia and Montclair High School in New Jersey before graduating cum laude from Radcliffe College with a degree in Slavonic Languages and Literature. A professional writer from 1965 to 2011, she served as secretary-treasurer of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1968 to 1970 and emigrated to Ireland in 1970. Her debut novel, Restoree (1967), featured a notably strong female protagonist, but she is best remembered for Dragonflight (1968) and the long-running Dragonriders of Pern series, alongside The Ship Who Sang (1969), which she considered her personal favorite, and the Harper Hall trilogy beginning with Dragonsong (1976). McCaffrey was the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction, for Weyr Search in 1968, and the first woman to win a Nebula Award, for Dragonrider in 1969; The White Dragon (1978) became the first science fiction novel by a woman to reach the New York Times bestseller list. She was named an SFWA Grand Master in 2005, inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2006, and received the Robert A. Heinlein Award in 2007 and the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 1999.