Anne Inez McCaffrey (1926-2011) was an American-born Irish writer best known for the Dragonriders of Pern science fiction series. She was the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction (for the novella Weyr Search) and the first to win a Nebula Award (for the novella Dragonrider). Her novel The White Dragon became one of the first science fiction books to appear on The New York Times bestseller list. She is also the author of the Acorna Universe series, which is a set of ten novels.