Outlander author, Diana Gabaldon, says she could “never in a million years” have imagined the impact of her books on Scotland.
Gabaldon, 73, wrote her first Outlander novel in 1988 after being inspired by “a man in a kilt” in an old episode of Doctor Who.
Her books have gone on to sell over 50 million copies around the world and inspire the hit TV series filmed in Scotland and starring Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe.
At the launch of a new book, “Outlander and Scotland: Touchstones and Signposts”, she became emotional after she was asked about the positive impact her books have made on Scotland.
The “Outlander Effect”, she heard, had seen visitors from across the world flock to Scotland, and also sparked a growth in interest in Gaelic language and culture.
Gabaldon said: “I would have never in a million years imagined that this would all happen.
“I wrote Outlander for practice, I was never going to show it to anyone.
“Being an academic I wanted to do the best research I could – I wasn’t going to write about anything that I didn’t know about, so I said I want to learn how to write a book and once I think I know how to write a book I’ll write a real book, which I might try to publish.
“What I wrote was Outlander and things got away from me quite quickly after that.”
Gabaldon’s Outlander series features Englishwoman Claire Randall, a 1940s combat nurse who finds herself transported through time to Scotland at the time of the 1745 Jacobite rising under Bonnie Prince Charlie, and later crosses the Atlantic with her new Highlander husband, Jamie Fraser.
The author had little prior knowledge of Scotland, however, when she saw Jamie McCrimmon, a character in the 1969 Doctor Who episode titled The War Games.
She began writing in 1988 and her first adventure in the series was published in 1991.
The historical time travel novels have now become one of the bestselling book series of all time, published in over 43 countries and in 39 languages.
Meanwhile, the TV adaptation first shown in 2014 has had the biggest onscreen impact on Scotland’s global image since Mel Gibson’s Oscar winning epic Braveheart in 1995.
Published in Edinburgh by Luath Press, “Outlander and Scotland: Touchstones and Signposts” is a collection of writings by fans of the Gabaldon’s Outlander novels and its TV adaptation.
Gabaldon, who contributed to the book, told fans attending the online launch: “It’s nothing that I would ever have expected in life.
“My only encounter with Scotland prior to writing Outlander was watching Doctor Who in a season which had a nice looking young man who appeared in a kilt.
“As I was looking for a place and time in which to set an historical novel, I said ‘well, why not Scotland?’ Since I didn’t know anything about any historical Scottish things it gave me a clean slate to work with and here we are years afterwards.”
She added: “I knew I wanted to write a novel, I just had no idea what kind. I thought if I write an historical novel I can look things up and I won’t have to make it all up from scratch.
“So I said ‘fine, an historical novel, where shall I set this?’ because I had no formal background in history.
“On the other hand I was an assistant professor at Arizona State University, which had an enormous library and the interlibrary loan system, which meant essentially I could get any book that was in print that some university owned.
“So I went about doing my research on Scotland by the very scientific method of going to the library and pulling out the various drawers in the little card catalogue, because we had no computers.
“So I said ‘ok, Scotland’, ‘Highlands’, and I came up with 18 cards and so I went to the shelf where those titles were listed and suddenly found 200 or 300 books on Scotland – geography, language, customs, dress etcetera.
“I took out as many as I could physically carry away with me and that’s where I started doing my research.”
