Dorothy, Lady Dunnett OBE (née Halliday, 25 August 1923 – 9 November 2001) was a Scottish novelist best known for her historical fiction.

Dunnett is most famous for her six novel series set during the 16th century, which concern the fictitious adventurer Francis Crawford of Lymond.

Writing in The Times Literary Supplement, Alexander Fiske-Harrison reviewed her final novel in 2000, Gemini, and through that her entire oeuvre of historical fiction: "Although Dunnett’s writing style is not the neutral prose of genre fiction and it can be opaque and hard to read, especially in the early works, at times, this works with the almost melodramatic content to produce a powerful, operatic mixture...

Meticulously researched, the series takes place in a wide variety of locations, including France, the Ottoman Empire, Malta, England, Scotland and Russia.

The series shares most of the locations in Dunnett's earlier series, the Lymond Chronicles, but it extends much further geographically to take in the important urban centres of Bruges, Venice, Florence, Geneva, and the Hanseatic League; Burgundy, Flanders, and Poland; Iceland; the Iberian Peninsula and Madeira; the Black Sea cities of Trebizond and Caffa; Persia; the Mediterranean islands of Cyprus and Rhodes; Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula; and West Africa and the city of Timbuktu.

King Hereafter (1982), her long novel set in Orkney and Scotland in the years just before the invasion of England by William the Conqueror, was in Dorothy Dunnett's eyes her masterpiece.

These books provide background information to historical characters and events featured in the Lymond Chronicles and The House of Niccolò, as well as explanations of classical allusions and literary and other quotations used in the two series, notes to sources of these citations, and many maps.

The second volume, which was written after the Niccolò series was completed, contains a bibliography of many of the hundreds of primary and secondary sources Dunnett used in her historical research.

In collaboration with her husband, Alastair Dunnett, she wrote the text for the photography book The Scottish Highlands (Photographs: David Patterson), published in 1988.

In December 2016, it was announced that the rights to the Lymond Chronicles had been obtained by Mammoth Screen with a view to making a TV series.

On 22 April 2006, a memorial stone to Lady Dunnett was laid by her grandchildren, Hal and Bella Dunnett, alongside those for Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott in the Makars' Court in Lady Stair's Close on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.

Dunnett's long-term home at 87 Colinton Road, Edinburgh was at an Edwardian era semi-detached villa in the Merchiston area, designed by Edward Calvert.

[6] There are several meetings of readers in the UK each year, in locations such as Oxford, Bath, London, York, Warwick, Harrogate and Stamford.

Meetings were held in Edinburgh, London, Vancouver, San Francisco, the Costa Del Sol, Boston, and other locations.