Barbara Hambly

Hambly was married for some years to George Alec Effinger, a science fiction writer. He died in 2002. She lives in Los Angeles. Hambly speaks freely of suffering from seasonal affective disorder, which was undiagnosed for years.

This historical mystery series begins with A Free Man of Color (1997) and features Benjamin January, a brilliant, classically educated, free colored surgeon and musician living in New Orleans during the antebellum years of the 1830s. At the time, New Orleans had a large and prosperous population of free people of color. Born a slave, as his mother was enslaved, January was freed as a young child by his mother's lover, under the plaçage system. Provided with an excellent education, he gained fluency in several classical and modern languages, and was thoroughly versed in the whole of classical Western learning and arts. He studied medicine in Paris, where he trained as a surgeon. He returned to Louisiana to escape the memory of his late wife, a woman from North Africa. As a free black in Louisiana, he cannot find work as a surgeon. He earns a modest living by his exceptional talent as a musician.

Hambly served as President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America from 1994 to 1996. Her works have been nominated for many awards in the fantasy and horror fiction categories, winning a Locus Award for Best Horror Novel Those Who Hunt the Night (1989) (released in the UK as Immortal Blood) and the Lord Ruthven Award for fiction for its sequel, Traveling with the Dead (1996).

She chose work that allowed her time to write; all of her novels contain a biography paragraph with a litany of jobs: high school teacher, model, waitress, technical editor, all-night liquor store clerk, and Shotokan karate instructor. Her first published novel was Time of the Dark (1982).

Hambly has a Masters in Medieval History from the University of California, Riverside. She completed her degree in 1975 and spent a year in Bordeaux as part of her studies.

Hambly was born in San Diego, California and grew up in Montclair, California. Her parents, Everett Edward Hambly Jr. and Florence Elizabeth (Moraski) Hambly, are from Fall River, Massachusetts; and Scranton, Pennsylvania (respectively). She has an older sister, Mary Ann Sanders, and a younger brother, Everett Edward Hambly, III. In her early teens, after reading J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, she affixed images of dragons to her bedroom door. She became interested in costumery from an early age, and has been a long-time participant in Society for Creative Anachronism activities. In the mid-1960s, the Hambly family spent a year in Australia.

Barbara Hambly (born August 28, 1951) is an American novelist and screenwriter within the genres of fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and historical fiction. She has a bestselling mystery series featuring a free man of color, a musician and physician, in New Orleans in the antebellum years. She also wrote a novel about Mary Todd Lincoln.