Born on April 1st, Anne McCaffrey has tried to live up to her auspicious natal day. She majored in Slavonic Languages and Literatures at Radcliffe College then turned to the stage and became a character actress. She also studied music for nine years and became intensely interested in the stage direction of opera, ending that phase of her experience with the stage direction of the American première of Carl Orff's Ludus De Nato Infante Mirificus, in which she also played a witch.

By the time her three children were in school, she had already achieved enough success with short stories to become a full-time writer. She has won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the E.E. 'Doc' Smith, the Golden Pen, and has been seven times a winner of the Science Fiction Book Club Award. She has also won the Margaret A. Edwards' Lifetime Achievement Literary Award.

She lives in a house of her own design, Dragonhold-Underhill (she had to dig out a hill on her farm to build it) in County Wicklow, Ireland.