Patricia Gaffney is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of twelve historical romances and five contemporary women’s fiction titles. She has won the Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart award and has been nominated six times for the RWA’s RITA award for excellence in romance writing.
Born on December 17, 1944, in Tampa, Florida, to an Irish Catholic family, Gaffney grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. After graduating from college, she worked as a high school teacher for one year before beginning a fifteen-year career as a freelance court reporter. It was during this time that she met her husband, Jon Pearson.
Gaffney’s life changed course in 1984 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her battle with the disease prompted her, in 1986, to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a novelist. Her first novel, Sweet Treason (1989), won a 1988 Golden Heart Award and the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice award for First Historical Romance. Her second novel, Fortune’s Lady (1989), which is set in England against the backdrop of the French Revolution, was shortlisted for the RITA. She followed her early success with Another Eden (1992), Crooked Hearts (1994), Sweet Everlasting (1994), Lily (1996), Outlaw in Paradise (1997), and Wild at Heart (1997), the latter of which was among ten finalists for RWA’s reader-nominated Favorite Book of the Year Award.
Since the late nineties, Gaffney has found added success writing women’s fiction. Her novels The Saving Graces (1999), Circle of Three (2000), Flight Lessons (2002), and The Goodbye Summer (2004) all appeared on several national bestseller lists. The Saving Graces was on the New York Times bestseller list for seventeen weeks.
With her friends Nora Roberts (writing as J. D. Robb), Mary Blayney, and others, Gaffney has also contributed novellas to three anthologies, all of which were New York Times bestsellers.
Gaffney lives with her husband and two dogs in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania.