Background

Jeff VanderMeer was born on July 7, 1968, in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, United States, as Jeffrey Scott VanderMeer. He is the son of Robert K. Vandermeer and Penelope Miller. He has a sister and two brothers. VanderMeer spent much of his childhood in Fiji Islands where his parents worked for the Peace Corps. Then the family spent six months traveling through Asia, Africa, and Europe before returning to the United States.

Education

Jeff VanderMeer began writing while studying in high school. Later he studied at the University of Florida. He also attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in 1992.

Career

Jeff VanderMeer began writing in the late 1980s and soon became a prolific contributor to small-press magazines. Some of the numerous horror and fantasy short stories, written during that period, were included in his collections The Book of Frog (1989) and The Book of Lost Places (1996). In 1994 he edited his first anthology Leviathan 1 with Luke O'Grady. His first novel, Dradin, in Love: A Tale of Elsewhen & Otherwhere, was published in 1996. It became the first section of “The Book of Ambergris” in the City of Saints and Madmen. Published in 2001 short-story collection City of Saints and Madmen, set in the imaginary city of Ambergris, was one of his first successes.

Later he wrote both fiction and nonfiction and edited anthologies, some of them with his wife Ann VanderMeer. VanderMeer’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Atlantic.com, and the Los Angeles Times. Together with his wife, they have taught writing workshops and given lectures all over the world. This literary couple has been profiled on Wired.com, NYT blog, and on national NPR. One of his most famous and successful works is Southern Reach Trilogy consisting of three novels Annihilation (2014), Authority (2014), and Acceptance (2014). In 2013, Paramount Pictures bought the movie rights for the series, and a film adaptation of Annihilation was made with Alex Garland as a writer-director. The film was released in 2018.

In another recognized novel Borne (2017), his new work of eco-fiction, VanderMeer explores the consequences of our biotech obsession by way of a giant flying bear. VanderMeer has a specific interest in biotechnology, and this bears fruit in Borne - not just in terms of the titular creation itself. This is a novel about good intentions gone bad, and how a single corporation can control human destiny. His most recent novel is Dead Astronauts (2019). The up-coming works are Hummingbird Salamander, The Journals of Doctor Mormeck, and The Book Murderer.

In addition to his writing career, VanderMeer taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference and the Miami International Book Fair, lectured at MIT, Brown, and the Library of Congress. He was the 2016-2017 Trias Writer-in-Residence for Hobart-William Smith College. VanderMeer serves as the co-director of Shared Worlds. In 2019, he was a judge for the National Book Award for Fiction.

Achievements

• Jeff VanderMeer received three World Fantasy Awards, BSFA Award, Locus Award, Nebula Award, and Shirley Jackson Award. He also won the Le Cafard Cosmique Award in France and the Tähtifantasia Award in Finland. He was also nominated for the World Fantasy Award fifteen times. VanderMeer was a finalist for the Hugo Award, Bram Stoker Award, International Horror Guild Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and many others. He is the recipient of an NEA-funded Florida Individual Artist Fellowship for excellence in fiction and a Florida Artist Enhancement Grant. His fiction was translated into twenty languages.

Works

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  • Shriek: An Afterword

    (An epic yet personal look at several decades of life, lov...)

    2006
  • The Compass of His Bones (and other stories)

    (The Compass of His Bones (and other stories) contains nov...)

    2011
  • The Big Book of Science Fiction

    (What if life was never-ending? What if you could change y...)

    2016
  • The Steampunk Bible

    (Steampunk - a grafting of Victorian aesthetic and punk ro...)

    2010
  • Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction

    (Wonderbook has become the definitive guide to writing sci...)

    2013
  • Secret Lives

    (The stories in this collection of unique short fiction ta...)

    2006
  • Secret Life

    (This collection of 23 stories reflects a diversity of app...)

    2004
  • Why Should I Cut Your Throat?

    (This nonfiction collection is an engaging look into the w...)

    2004
  • Veniss Underground

    (First, Nicholas, a would-be Living Artist, seeks to escap...)

    2003
  • Finch

    (In Finch, mysterious underground inhabitants known as the...)

    2009
  • This World Is Full of Monsters

    (An alien invasion comes to one man’s doorstep in the form...)

    2017
  • The Strange Bird: A Borne Story

    (The Strange Bird is a new kind of creature, built in a la...)

    2017
  • The Third Bear

    (Jeff VanderMeer continues to amaze with this surreal, inn...)

    2010
  • Predator: South China Sea

    (On a remote South China Sea island, a deadly hunt is unde...)

    2008
  • Borne

    (In Borne, a young woman named Rachel survives as a scaven...)

    2017
  • Greensleeves

    (Greensleeves is the story of a resigned librarian who can...)

    2011
  • Dead Astronauts

    (A messianic blue fox who slips through warrens of time an...)

    2019
  • Balzac's War: A Tale of Veniss Underground

    (A deadly invasion of a far-future ecologically ravaged ea...)

    2011
  • Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer

    (The world has changed and with it the craft of writing. I...)

    2009
  • Dradin, in Love: A Tale of Elsewhen & Otherwhere 1996

• books

  • The Southern Reach

    (The Southern Reach Trilogy consists of three books: Annih...)

    2014

Views

Jeff VanderMeer's influences range from Kafka to anime. His influences also include Angela Carter whose books he read when he was young.

Quotations: "I often feel it is easier to spoil a novel by beginning to write too soon than by beginning to write too late. Perhaps this is because I need to know certain things before I can even contemplate writing a novel."

"When I begin to write in earnest, I am still, for the most part, spending more time thinking about the novel than writing it."

"Living in the world of your novel is not just something that happens because you’re writing a novel. It’s important to the actual creation of the novel."

"It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?"

"Silence creates its own violence."

"Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough."

"We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means."

Personality

Jeff VanderMeer drinks very little, he gets to bed before midnight, he eats healthy food, he goes to the gym every other day and gets exercise on off days.

Connections

In 2003 Jeff VanderMeer married Ann Kennedy.

Father:

Robert K. Vandermeer

Mother:

Penelope Miller

Wife:

Ann VanderMeer

Ann VanderMeer is the Hugo Award-winning former editor of Weird Tales magazine and has worked with her husband on the genre-defining anthologies The New Weird, Steampunk, and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, and The Weird.