Lois McMaster Bujold was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1949. She has two brothers, eight years and six years older than she is. She has been a voracious reader all her life, beginning with stories about horses (she had her own pony as a child), and discovering adult science fiction at the age of nine. She tried several majors in college, including English, which she drifted away from because she preferred creative writing to literary criticism, and biology - while studying biology she went on a six-week field trip of East Africa which later supplied some of the landscape and wildlife for her first novel, Shards of Honor.

After leaving college she had a job as a pharmacy technician, and then left to start her family. She was inspired to start writing professionally when she heard that her best friend, Lillian Stewart Carl, had sold some stories. She was unemployed with two small children at the time, so at first she had to write while the children were taking naps, or go to the library to work.

Most of her books belong to the Vorkosigan Series and are listed below. She has also written Dreamweaver's Dilemma, a collection of short stories and essays, and The Spirit Ring, an Italianate fantasy. Her next book, The Curse of Chalion, is an unrelated fantasy and is scheduled to come out in July 2001.

What I like best about her Vorkosigan series is that Miles Vorkosigan changes with time and goes through a radical career change in "Memory". People who don't like the violence and the military action in her earlier books might like her new books "Komarr" and "A Civil Campaign" which are more focussed on character-centred drama and romance.