Jeff VanderMeer

Personal life

VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but 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 and Gainesville. 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 The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter. VanderMeer has stated that the novel "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.

In 2003 VanderMeer married Ann Kennedy, then editor for the small Buzzcity Press and magazine the Silver Web. The VanderMeers currently live in Tallahassee, Florida.

Early career

VanderMeer launched his writing career 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 released in his 1989 debut self-published collection The Book of Frog and the 1996 collection The Book of Lost Places. He also wrote poetry, with his poem "Flight Is for Those Who Have Not Yet Crossed Over" being a co-winner of the 1994 Rhysling Award, and edited two issues of the self-published zine Jabberwocky.

One of VanderMeer 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 Ambergris including Shriek: An Afterword in 2006 and Finch in 2009, the last of which was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel. 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 rock 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."

The Southern Reach

In 2014, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a new series by VanderMeer called the Southern Reach Trilogy. The trilogy, consisting of the novels Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, 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 the hike through St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge. VanderMeer has also cited a number of books as having an influence on the Southern Reach including The Other Side of the Mountain by Michel Bernanos.

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 trilogy's 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 critical response for the series was extremely positive. Slate called the trilogy one of "the most uncompromising—yet most rewarding—genre series" while authors like Stephen King praised the series calling it "creepy and fascinating". The New York Times wrote a full page review of the final book, Acceptance, calling it "pure reading pleasure" and adding that "VanderMeer has created an immersive and wonderfully realized world."

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 has also been adapted into an upcoming 2018 Hollywood film by director Alex Garland. The film stars Natalie Portman, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Oscar Isaac.

Recent Work

In 2017 VanderMeer released Borne, a biotech apocalyptic 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." Publisher's 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 features different characters.

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. He's also working on a story called "The Three," based on the dead astronauts mentioned in Borne, along with another Southern Reach story.

Critical reputation

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 fiction has been described as "evocative (with) intellectual observations both profound and disturbing" and "lyrical and harrowing," with his mixing of genres producing "something unique and unsettling."

VanderMeer's writing has been compared with the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Kafka, and Thoreau.

Literary criticism and editing

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. For a number of years he was a regular columnist for the Amazon book-culture blog and has served as a judge for the Eisner Awards, among others. He has been a guest speaker at such diverse events as the Brisbane Writers Festival, Finncon in Helsinki, and the American Library Association annual conference.

VanderMeer has also edited a number of anthologies. He won a 2003 World Fantasy Award for Leviathan, Volume Three, a collection of genre-bending stories he edited with Forrest Aguirre. He and Mark Roberts were also finalists for the same award the next year for the anthology The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases.

Most of his recent anthologies have been collaborations with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, the Hugo-award-winning former editor of Weird Tales. These anthologies include The New Weird, a collection of stories from New Weird authors; Last Drink Bird Head, a charity anthology benefiting literacy; The Weird, a World Fantasy Award winning collection of weird fiction; Time Traveler's Almanac, an anthology of time-travel fiction; Fast Ships, Black Sails, a pirate fiction anthology; and the Locus Award winning The Big Book of Science Fiction.

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. The press is currently an imprint of Wyrm Publishing. One of the Ministry's publications, The Troika by Stepan Chapman, won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1997.

Teaching

In addition to editing and writing, VanderMeer has also been involved in teaching creative writing. One of the projects he is involved with is Shared Worlds, an annual two-week program that aims to teach creative writing to teenagers. VanderMeer has also taught at the Clarion Workshop and at Trinity Prep School. In addition to his teaching, VanderMeer has also written guides to creative writing such as Wonderbook, which won a BSFA Award, a Locus Award, and was nominated for a Hugo and World Fantasy Award.

Awards

VanderMeer has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award 14 times. He has also won an NEA-funded Florida Individual Writers' Fellowship, and, the Le Cafard Cosmique award in France and the Tähtifantasia Award in Finland, both for City of Saints. He has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, Bram Stoker Award, International Horror Guild Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and many others. Novels such as Veniss Underground and Shriek: An Afterword have made the year's best lists of Amazon.com, The Austin Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Publishers Weekly, among others.

Other Awards include: