Neal Shusterman

Neal Shusterman (born November 12, 1962) is an American writer of young-adult fiction.

Shusterman was born on November 12, 1962, and raised in Brooklyn, New York City.

From a young age, Shusterman was an avid reader.

His family is Jewish, and has claimed that he is at least 40-50% North African according to a DNA test.

At the age of 16, Shusterman and his family moved to Mexico City.

He finished high school there at the American School Foundation and is quoted as saying that "Having an international experience changed my life, giving me a fresh perspective on the world, and a sense of confidence I might not have otherwise."

He attended the University of California, Irvine, where he double-majored in psychology and theater, and was also on the varsity swim team.

After college, Shusterman worked as an assistant at the Irvin Arthur Associates, a talent agency in Los Angeles, where Lloyd Segan became his agent.

Within a year, Shusterman had his first book deal and a screenwriting job.

He lives in Florida.

He served as a judge for the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship in 2012.

His novels Downsiders and Full Tilt have each won over 20 awards.

Unwind has won more than 30 awards and is in development with Universal TV as a television series.

His novel Scythe is in development with Universal as a feature film.

He won the 2015 National Book Award for Young People's Literature for his book Challenger Deep and his novel, Scythe, was a 2017 Michael L. Printz Honor book.

Shusterman has received numerous honors for his books, including the National Book Award in 2015 for his novel Challenger Deep, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and the 2008 California Young Reader Medal for The Schwa Was Here.

He has been nominated four times (twice in 2019; 2020; 2023) in different categories of the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis and won the youth jury award in 2019.

In March 2023 the German translation of the book Roxy, written with his son Jarrod Shusterman, was nominated by the youth jury.

Shusterman has also written for TV, including the Original Disney Channel movie Pixel Perfect, as well as episodes of Goosebumps and Animorphs.

He has written for R. L. Stine's The Haunting Hour: The Series and is also adapting his novel Challenger Deep for 20th Century Fox.

Fellow author Orson Scott Card invited Shusterman to write novels parallel to Ender's Game about other characters from the series, but schedules didn't permit it, and Card wrote Ender's Shadow and the subsequent series himself.