R. A. MacAvoy

Roberta Ann MacAvoy (born December 13, 1949) is an American fantasy and science fiction author. Several of her books draw on Celtic or Zen themes. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1984.

R. A. MacAvoy was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She attended Case Western Reserve University and received a B.A. in 1971. She worked from 1975 to 1978 as an assistant to the financial aid officer of Columbia College of Columbia University and from 1978 to 1982 as a computer programmer at SRI International before turning to full-time writing in 1982. She married Ronald Allen Cain in 1978.^[1]

R. A. MacAvoy was diagnosed with dystonia (a neuro-muscular disorder causing painful sustained muscle contractions) following the publication of her Lens of the World series in the early 1990s. She now has the disorder under control and has returned to writing.^[2]

• Tea with the Black Dragon (1983)
• Twisting the Rope (1986)

• Damiano (1983, Bantam)
• Damiano's Lute (1984, Bantam)
• Raphael (1984, Bantam^[3])
• omnibus edition titled A Trio for Lute

These books were adapted by Bantam Software into a text adventure, I, Damiano: The Wizard of Partestrada, for MS-DOS and Apple IIe computers.

• Lens of the World (1990)
• King of the Dead (1991)
• Winter of the Wolf [vt The Belly of the Wolf] (1993)

• The Go-Between (2005) – Amazon Shorts e-book, republished with editorial changes as In Between (2009)
• Death and Resurrection (2011, Prime Books^[4]) – includes The Go-Between/In Between

• The Book of Kells (1985)
• The Grey Horse (1987)
• The Third Eagle (1989)
• Albatross (with Nancy Palmer) (2016)
• Shimmer (with Nancy Palmer) (2018)

• R. A. MacAvoy at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• RAMacavoy.com – blog
• Review of Damiano & Damiano's Lute at Ansible.co.uk, by editor David Langford