Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer grew up in the Fiji Islands and spent six months traveling around the world before returning to the United States. These travels have deeply influenced his fiction. He is a two-time winner (six-time finalist) of the World Fantasy Award, as well as a past finalist for the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. VanderMeer is the author of several surreal/magic realist novels and story collections, including City of Saints & Madmen, Veniss Underground, and Shriek: An Afterword, which have been or will soon be published by Pan Macmillan, Tor Books, and Bantam Books, among others. VanderMeer's most recent books have made the year's best lists of Publishers Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Weekly, Publishers' News, and Amazon.com. He is the recipient of an NEA-funded Florida Individual Artist Fellowship for excellence in fiction (1995-96) and a Florida Artist Enhancement Grant (2004-2005). While attending the University of Florida, he won that institution's Michael J. Hauptmann Award for outstanding undergraduate achievement in creative writing. In 2001, Locus Online named him one of the ten best speculative fiction writers in the world. International bestselling author Peter Straub has called his work "brilliant...playful, poignant, and utterly, wildly, imaginative, while CNN.com has called it "Darkly distinctive! Not to be missed!" VanderMeer's book-length fiction has been translated into ten languages, while his short fiction has appeared in several year's best anthologies, been short-listed for Best American Short Stories, and been published in periodicals in more than twenty countries. His short story collection Secret Life was published in 2004 to widespread acclaim. Nonfiction by VanderMeer has appeared in The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, and many others, with a nonfiction collection published in 2004. In addition to his writing, VanderMeer has run an award-winning publishing company for the past 15 years and edited or co-edited several anthologies, including the critically acclaimed Leviathan fiction anthology series and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. VanderMeer's appearances in recent years include the Suncoast Writers Conference, the South Carolina Book Festival, the Brisbane Writers Festival, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, and the New Orleans Independent Book Fair, among others. He currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, Ann. Photo by Mia Hansen