Marius Gabriel is a American, who studied Shakespeare in the University of Newcastle in northern England. To finance his postgraduate research, he decided to start writing romance fiction. He sold his first novels to Mills & Boon in 1983 under the pseudonym Madeleine Ker. He left his academic pursuits to become a full-time writer. He said: "I have never trained as an artist. Mind you, I never trained as a writer, either. Also, like many self-taught persons, I had an idiot as a teacher. But onward and upward... " Marius Gabriel lives in Spain with his wife and his three children.