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Anne McCaffrey, was the famous author of the Dragonriders of Pern series [1] as well as both the Talent and The Tower and the Hive Series.

Anne Inez McCaffrey (1 April 1926 – 21 November 2011) was an American-Irish writer known for the Dragonriders of Pern science fiction series. She was the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction (Best Novella, Weyr Search, 1968) and the first to win a Nebula Award (Best Novella, Dragonrider, 1969). Her 1978 novel The White Dragon became one of the first science-fiction books to appear on the New York Times Best Seller list.

In 2005 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named McCaffrey its 22nd Grand Master, an annual award to living writers of fantasy and science fiction. She was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame on 17 June 2006. She also received the Robert A. Heinlein Award for her work in 2007.

Life and career[edit][]

Anne McCaffrey was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the second of three children of Anne Dorothy (née McElroy) and Col. George Herbert McCaffrey. She had two brothers: Hugh ("Mac", died 1988) and Kevin Richard McCaffrey ("Kevie"). Her father had Irish and English ancestry, and her mother was of Irish descent. She attended Stuart Hall (a girls' boarding school in Staunton, Virginia), and graduated from Montclair High School in Montclair, New Jersey. In 1947 she graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College with a degree in Slavonic languages and Literature.

In 1950 she married Horace Wright Johnson (died 2009), who shared her interests in music, opera and ballet. They had three children: Alec Anthony, born 1952; Todd, born 1956; and Georgeanne ("Gigi", Georgeanne Kennedy), born 1959.

Except for a short time in Düsseldorf, the family lived for most of a decade in Wilmington, Delaware. They moved to Sea Cliff, Long Island in 1965, and McCaffrey became a full-time writer.

McCaffrey served a term as secretary-treasurer of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1968 to 1970. In addition to handcrafting the Nebula Award trophies, her responsibilities included production of two monthly newsletters and their distribution by mail to the membership.

McCaffrey immigrated to Ireland with her two younger children in 1970, weeks after filing for divorce. Ireland had recently exempted resident artists from income taxes, an opportunity that fellow science-fiction author Harry Harrison had promptly taken and helped to promote. McCaffrey's mother soon joined the family in Dublin. The following spring, McCaffrey was guest of honour at her first British science-fiction convention (Eastercon 22, 1971). There she met British reproductive biologist Jack Cohen, who would be a consultant on the science of Pern.

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