If you walk into a local bookstore here and start browsing the fiction aisles, you'll notice a funny thing happens around the D's. One author fills up an entire shelf with book after book. That's how you know you've come to the Dorothy Dunnett section.

Who is she? She is a Scottish author who has been described as the finest living writer of historical fiction, a portrait painter who started writing in the 1950s when she had exhausted the tales of statecraft and diplomacy, trade and intrigue that had already been written. She embarked on years of research before her first novel was published in this country in 1961, the first of what would become the six-book series chronicling the adventures of Lymond of Crawford, a 16th-century Scotsman who battles through Europe, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire.

Readers fell in love with Lymond and with Dunnett, whose work has drawn readers from Minnesota to New Zealand and who has inspired newletters, magazines and literally scores of Web sites where fans debate the fate of her characters and the clues to their fates that she places throughout her texts.

Her most recent book, Gemini, is the capstone to an eight-tome series that looks at the life of an illegitimate dyer's apprentice named Claes who travels through 14th-century Europe, Africa, the East, and Iceland in a quest for both his fortune and his true family identity.

About the author
Dorothy Dunnett was born in 1923 in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland. Dunnett started writing in the late 1950s. Her first novel, The Game of Kings, was published in the United States in 1961, and in the United Kingdom the year after. She has published 20 books to date, including the six-part Lymond Chronicles and the ongoing Niccolo Series. Also an accomplished professional portrait painter, Dunnett has exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy on many occasions and has had portraits commissioned by a number of prominent public figures in Scotland.

In the past, she has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, a Trustee of the Scottish National War Memorial, and Director of the Edinburgh Book Festival. She has also served on numerous cultural committees, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 1992 she was awarded the Office of the British Empire for services to literature. She lives in Scotland and has two sons and one grandson.