BERNARD CORNWELL was born in London in 1944, the product of a wartime romance between a Canadian Air Force officer and an Englishwoman.  He was adopted by a couple belonging to a fundamentalist sect called the Peculiar People who, among many other things, disapproved of television, military service, and novels. He has made his career in television and by writing novels of military history.
    He was editor in chief of Thames Television News, and, before that, Head of Current Affairs Television for the BBC in Northern Ireland.  Love brought him to the United States, but the American government, not recognising romance as a legitimate reason for immigration, denied Bernard a Green Card. He stayed anyway and, unable to work legitimately, airily decided to write a novel.  That was in 1979.  He and Judy married in 1980, he is now a US citizen, and there have been over 40 novels.  He is chiefly known for the Sharpe books, a series of (so far) 21 books that tell the story of a British rifleman fighting Napoleon's forces in Portugal, Spain, and France.  The books were made into a TV series starring Sean Bean.  Bernard has also written a series on the American Civil War, the Arthurian saga, the Hundred Years War, and is currently engaged in a series about the emergence of England in the 8th and 9th centuries.  He and Judy live on Cape Cod, where they sail a gaff-rigged cutter called Royalist.

     DIANA GABALDON is the author of the award-winning, New York Times-bestselling Outlander novels, described by Salon magazine as "the smartest historical sci-fi adventure-romance story ever written by a science Ph.D. with a background in scripting "Scrooge McDuck" comics."
    Dr. Gabaldon holds three degrees in science: Zoology, Marine Biology, and Quantitative Behavioral Ecology, and spent a dozen years as a university professor with an expertise in scientific computation before beginning to write fiction.  She has written scientific articles and textbooks, worked as an editor on the MacMillan Encyclopedia of Computers, founded the scientific-computation journal Science Software Quarterly, and has written numerous comic-book scripts for Walt Disney.  None of this has anything whatever to do with her novels, but there it is.
(Photo copyright Barbara Schnell)