Anne McCaffrey

Pern, a settled world whose people breed telepathic dragons to burn a devouring spore out of the sky, first appeared in the 1967 novella Weyr Search. It made Anne McCaffrey the first woman to take a Hugo Award for fiction, and its sequel, Dragonrider, brought her a Nebula the following year; Dragonflight welds the two together as the opening novel of the sequence. The Harper Hall of Pern gathers the three books she wrote for younger readers, Dragonsong, Dragonsinger and Dragondrums, in which a girl called Menolly flees a home that forbids her music and raises nine fire lizards. The Rowan, from 1990, leaves Pern for the Tower and the Hive series, about a dynasty of telepaths who shift freight between worlds and hold off an insect enemy. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1926 and a Radcliffe College graduate in Slavonic languages, McCaffrey moved to Ireland in 1970 and died at her County Wicklow home in November 2011. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named her a Grand Master in 2005.