Colleen McCullough.

Novelist.

Born: June 1, 1937

Died: January 29, 2015.

Colleen McCullough, who has died aged 77 after many years of ill health, was an Australian writer who found huge success with her best-selling novel The Thorn Birds, which told the story of an affair between a young woman and a priest in the outback. It was turned into a successful television mini-series starring Richard Chamberlain; her first novel, Tim, also became a film starring Mel Gibson.

The mainstream success (The Thorn Birds sold 30 million copies worldwide) meant that McCullough was not always taken seriously by reviewers or the literary establishment, although she was typically bullish in her response. "What they'll never forgive me for," she once said, "is that The Thorn Birds is the great Australian novel."

In all, she wrote 25 novels - her first was published in 1974 and her final book Bittersweet was released in 2013 - but initially she worked as a medical researcher. She grew up in Sydney and as a scholarship student at her local college, had hopes of becoming a surgeon. However, an allergic reaction to scrubbing up meant she had to switch disciplines and she studied neurophysiology instead.

Having completed her studies in Australia, she moved to London in the early 1960s to study for a masters before becoming a research associate at Yale Medical School. She then spent 10 years as a researcher there, before taking up writing in the 1970s.

Her first novel Tim, which related an affair between a middle-aged woman and a gardener with learning difficulties, was published in 1974 but it was with The Thorn Birds three years later that her career really took off. The paperback rights sold for a then record $1.9million and it was then made into one of the most watched miniseries of all time, starring Chamberlain and Rachel Ward; it was shown in 1983.

Despite pressure to do so, McCullough always refused to write a sequel to The Thorn Birds and went on to write in a number of genres. There was a series of whodunnits and seven popular novels set in ancient Rome. She also wrote a sequel to Pride and Prejudice which did nothing to endear her to the critics.

In recent years, she had been suffering a number of health problems including arthritis and diabetes and was slowly blinded due to macular degeneration, but she continued to write using dictation.

She died on Norfolk Island, an Australian territory in the South Pacific, and is survived by her husband, Ric Robinson.

HarperCollins Australia publishing director Shona Martyn said: "Colleen McCullough's contribution to Australian writing - and to readers around the world - has been immense. She was one of the first Australian writers to succeed on the world stage."