Jeff VanderMeer spent his childhood in the Fiji Islands and traveled through Asia, Africa and Europe before he returned to the United States. These travels influenced his writing, and he was dubbed “the weird Thoreau” by The New Yorker. VanderMeer’s novel “Annihilation,” first in the bestselling Southern Reach trilogy, won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, and inspired the 2018 Paramount film of the same name. His recent books include “Borne,” a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, as well as “The Strange Bird,” “Dead Astronauts” and a debut young adult novel, “A Peculiar Peril” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). He has taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference and the Miami International Book Fair and is a frequent speaker on issues related to climate change. Among his many other endeavors, he is a co-director of Shared Worlds, a teen science fiction/fantasy writing camp in South Carolina.
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