1. Jeff VanderMeer was born on July 7,1968 and is an American author, editor, and literary critic.
25 Facts About Jeff VanderMeer
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Jeff VanderMeer has edited with his wife Ann VanderMeer such influential and award-winning anthologies as The New Weird, The Weird, and The Big Book of Science Fiction.
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Jeff VanderMeer has been called "one of the most remarkable practitioners of the literary fantastic in America today," with The New Yorker naming him the "King of Weird Fiction".
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Jeff VanderMeer's fiction is noted for eluding genre classifications even as his works bring in themes and elements from genres such as postmodernism, ecofiction, the New Weird and post-apocalyptic fiction.
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Jeff VanderMeer's writing has been described as "evocative" and containing "intellectual observations both profound and disturbing," and has been compared with the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, and Henry David Thoreau.
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Jeff VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania in 1968, and spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps.
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Jeff VanderMeer attended the University of Florida for three years and, in 1992, took part in the Clarion Writers Workshop.
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Jeff VanderMeer began writing in the late 1980s while still in high school and quickly became a prolific contributor to small-press magazines.
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Several of Jeff VanderMeer's novels were subsequently set in the same place, including Shriek: An Afterword and Finch, the latter of which was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel.
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Jeff VanderMeer has worked in other media, including on a movie based on his novel Shriek that featured an original soundtrack by rock band The Church.
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Jeff VanderMeer wrote a Predator tie-in novel for Dark Horse Comics called Predator: South China Seas and worked with animator Joel Veitch on a Play Station Europe animation of his story "A New Face in Hell".
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In 2014, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Series, consisting of the novels Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance.
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Jeff VanderMeer has said that the main inspiration for Area X and the series was his hike through St Marks National Wildlife Refuge.
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The Other Side of the Mountain by Michel Bernanos is among the books Jeff VanderMeer has cited as having had an influence.
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In 2017 Jeff VanderMeer released Borne, a "biotech apocalypse" novel about a scavenger named Rachel trying to survive both a city "plunged into a primordial realm of myth, fable, and fairy tale" and a five-story-tall flying bear named Mord.
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Jeff VanderMeer is a frequent writer of critical literary reviews and essays, which have appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, and other places.
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Jeff VanderMeer has been a guest speaker at such diverse events as the Brisbane Writers Festival, Finncon in Helsinki, and the American Library Association annual conference.
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In 2019, Jeff VanderMeer was a judge for the National Book Award for Fiction.
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Jeff VanderMeer won a 2003 World Fantasy Award for Leviathan, Volume Three, a collection of genre-bending stories he edited with Forrest Aguirre.
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Jeff VanderMeer is the founding editor and publisher of the Ministry of Whimsy Press, which he set up in the late 1980s while still in high school.
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Jeff VanderMeer has taught at the Clarion Workshop and at Trinity Prep School.
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Jeff VanderMeer's writing has been compared with the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Kafka, and Thoreau.
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In 2003, Jeff VanderMeer married Ann Kennedy, then editor for the small Buzzcity Press and Silver Web magazine.
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Jeff VanderMeer has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award 14 times.
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Jeff VanderMeer has won an NEA-funded Florida Individual Writers' Fellowship, and, the Le Cafard Cosmique award in France and the Tahtifantasia Award in Finland, both for City of Saints.