Anne Rice was born in New Orleans in 1941, the second daughter in an Irish Catholic family. She is the author of many bestselling books. She is perhaps best known for her incredibly successful Vampire Chronicles—Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Dammed, The Tale of the Body Thief (published in Penguin) and Memnoch the Devil. Her other books include the Mayfair witches sequence The Witching Hour, Lasher (both published in Penguin) and Taltos; the novels Cry to Heaven, The Mummy or Ramses the Damned (both published in Penguin), The Servant of the Bones and, recently, Pandora, the first part of her New Tales of the Vampires series.

She lived for many years in San Francisco but has now moved back to her native New Orleans where she lives with her husband, poet and university professor Stan Rice, and their son.