Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer (born July 7, 1968 ) is an American author, editor, and literary critic.

Initially associated with the New Weird literary genre, VanderMeer crossed over into mainstream success with his bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy.

The trilogy's first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, and was adapted into a Hollywood film by director Alex Garland.

Among VanderMeer's other novels are Shriek: An Afterword and Borne.

He has also 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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

After returning to the United States, he spent time in Ithaca, New York, and Gainesville, Florida.

VanderMeer began writing in the late 1980s while still in high school and quickly became a prolific contributor to small-press magazines.

During this time VanderMeer wrote a number of horror and fantasy short stories, some of which were collected in his 1989 self-published book The Book of Frog and in the 1996 collection The Book of Lost Places.

He attended the University of Florida for three years and, in 1992, took part in the Clarion Writers Workshop.

When VanderMeer was 20, he read Angela Carter's novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, which he has said "blew the back of my head off, rewired my brain: I had never encountered prose like that before, never such passion and boldness on the page."

Carter's fiction inspired VanderMeer to both improve and be fearless with his own writing.

He also wrote poetry—his poem "Flight Is for Those Who Have Not Yet Crossed Over" was a co-winner of the 1994 Rhysling Award—and edited two issues of the self-published zine Jabberwocky.

In 2000, his novella The Transformation of Martin Lake won the World Fantasy Award.

VanderMeer has also worked in other media, including on a movie based on his novel Shriek that featured an original soundtrack by rock band The Church.

The band Murder By Death likewise recorded a soundtrack for Finch, which was released alongside a limited edition of the book.

VanderMeer also 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".

One of VanderMeer's early successes was his 2001 short-story collection City of Saints and Madmen, set in the imaginary city of Ambergris.

Several of VanderMeer's novels were subsequently set in the same place, including Shriek: An Afterword (2006) and Finch (2009), the latter of which was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel.

In 2014, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, consisting of the novels Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance.

The story focuses on a secret agency that manages expeditions into a location known as Area X. The area is an uninhabited and abandoned part of the United States that nature has begun to reclaim after a mysterious world-changing event.

VanderMeer has said that the main inspiration for Area X and the series was his hike through St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge.

The Other Side of the Mountain by Michel Bernanos is among the books VanderMeer has cited as also having had an influence.

The trilogy was released in quick succession over an 8-month period, in what has been called an innovative "Netflix-inspired strategy."

The strategy helped the second and third books reach the New York Times Bestseller list, and established VanderMeer as "one of the most forward-thinking authors of the decade."

The series ended up being highly honored, with Annihilation winning the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards for Best Novel.

The entire trilogy was also named a finalist for the 2015 World Fantasy Award and the 2016 Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis.

Annihilation was also adapted into a film of the same name by writer-director Alex Garland.

The film stars Natalie Portman, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Oscar Isaac.

In 2017 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.

As with the Southern Reach trilogy, the novel was highly praised, with The Guardian saying, "VanderMeer’s recent work has been Ovidian in its underpinnings, exploring the radical transformation of life forms and the seams between them."

Publishers Weekly said the novel reads "like a dispatch from a world lodged somewhere between science fiction, myth, and a video game" and that with Borne Vandermeer has essentially invented a new literary genre, "weird literature."

Paramount Pictures has optioned the film rights to Borne.

In August 2017 VanderMeer released the novella The Strange Bird: A Borne Story.

The stand-alone story is set in the same world as Borne but featuring different characters.

Dead Astronauts, a stand-alone short novel set in the Borne universe, was released on December 3, 2019.

VanderMeer's upcoming novels include Hummingbird Salamander, which is set ten seconds into the future and deals with "bioterrorism, ecoterrorism, and climate change," and a young adult series called Jonathan Lambshead and the Golden Sphere.