Short answers, pulled from the story.
Leigh Brackett was an American author and screenwriter who lived from the 7th of December 1915 to the 18th of March 1978. She earned the nickname "the Queen of Space Opera" for her prominence as a female writer during the Golden Age of Science Fiction, producing influential planetary romances set on Mars and Venus.
George Lucas hired Brackett to write the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back based on his story outline. She delivered the screenplay, titled "Star Wars sequel", shortly before her death in March 1978. Lucas discarded her draft and wrote new screenplays, but Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan received the final screenplay credit; her credit was given in tribute.
Brackett's first published story was "Martian Quest", which appeared in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. She was in her mid-20s when it was published.
In 1956, Brackett's novel The Long Tomorrow made her the first woman ever shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and one of the first two women ever nominated for a Hugo alongside C. L. Moore. In 2020, she posthumously won a Retro Hugo for Best Novel for Shadow Over Mars, originally published in Startling Stories in the Fall of 1944.
Leigh Brackett co-wrote several films for Howard Hawks, including The Big Sleep in 1946, Rio Bravo in 1959, Hatari! in 1962, El Dorado in 1966, and Rio Lobo in 1970. Hawks initially hired her after being impressed by her hard-boiled novel No Good from a Corpse.
Eric John Stark is a recurring character Brackett introduced in "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" in 1949. He is an orphan from Earth raised by the semi-sentient aboriginals of Mercury, who were later killed by Earthmen. When threatened, Stark reverts to a primitive self called N'Chaka, the man without a tribe. Brackett brought the character back in the Skaith trilogy published between 1974 and 1976.