For queries of any kind, please use the feedback form. Jeff reads every query personally. His literary and film interests are represented by Joe Veltre at Gersh. His entertainment lawyer is Alex Kohner.

To arrange a speaking engagement, contact Christie Hinrichs at Authors Unbound.

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Profiles

Audubon Magazine
New York Times
New Yorker
Interview Magazine

Short Bio

Jeff VanderMeer's bestselling, critically acclaimed novels include the Borne trilogy (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts) and the Southern Reach series (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, Absolution, and the forthcoming Abdication). Annihilation won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a major motion picture by Alex Garland, starring Natalie Portman. The Southern Reach series has been translated into more than thirty languages and was a finalist for the Hugo Award. VanderMeer, a popular public speaker, has given talks at MIT, Columbia, Yale, the Guggenheim, and Vanderbilt. He recently had the honor of delivering the John Hersey Memorial Address (Key West Literary Seminar) and the Walter Harding Lecture at SUNY Geneseo. Called "the weird Thoreau" by The New Yorker, VanderMeer has had major environmental nonfiction appear in Time, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and Esquire, among other publications. 

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Long Bio

Jeff VanderMeer's internationally bestselling, critically acclaimed Southern Reach series has been translated into over 37 languages. The first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award, and was made into a movie by Paramount and Alex Garland in 2018. Recent works include Absolution, Hummingbird Salamander, Bliss, and A Peculiar Peril, in addition to Theo Ellsworth's graphic novel adaptation of his short story Secret Life. Dead Astronauts, Borne, and The Strange Bird are being developed for TV by AMC and continue to explore themes related to the environment, animals, and our future. 

Forthcoming works include a fifth Southern Reach novel, Abdication, and a Southern Reach coffee table book from Abrams Image. His new novel cycle, the Strange Architect series, is set to debut in 2029 with the first volume, How to Be Free.

Over a 40-year career, VanderMeer has been a four-time World Fantasy Award winner and 20-time nominee. His work has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Hugo Award, and many others. For eleven years, VanderMeer served as the co-founder and director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen SF/fantasy writing camp he helped found, located at Wofford College in South Carolina. 

Called “the weird Thoreau” by The New Yorker, VanderMeer lived in Florida since middle school, attending the University of Florida in Gainesville before moving to Tallahassee in 1992 and eventually moving to Portland, Oregon, in 2026. He frequently speaks about issues related to climate change, and storytelling, including at Vanderbilt, DePaul, MIT, the Key West Literary Seminar, Yale, and the Guggenheim. He has taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference and the Miami International Book Fair, among many others, and was the 2016-2017 Trias Writer-in-Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York. He is the recipient of an NEA-funded Florida Individual Artist Fellowship for excellence in fiction and a Florida Artist Enhancement Grant. Nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Nation, Esquire, TIME, Current Affairs, New York Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times. He has served as a judge for the National Book Award, the Eisner Awards, the World Fantasy Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award, among others.

Previous novels include Veniss Underground and the Ambergris Cycle (City of Saints & Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch), reissued from MCD/FSG, with nonfiction titles including Wonderbook, the world’s first fully illustrated writing guide, and Booklife, the first career guide to fully integrate the internet into tactics and strategy. His short story collections include The Third Bear, the title story from which is under option for development into film.

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VanderMeer grew up in the Fiji Islands and spent six months traveling through Asia, Africa, and Europe before returning to the United States. These travels have deeply influenced his fiction, which he started writing at age eight, publishing his first short story at age 14. Early on, he wrote and published poetry and short fiction extensively, in addition to running a publishing house, the Ministry of Whimsy, and holding literary events featuring National Book Award winners like Richard Wilbur and other major poets at the Thomasville Center in Gainesville, Florida. The Ministry became the first small press to have a book win the Philip K. Dick Award (Stepan Chapman’s The Troika) and he edited the award-winning Leviathan series, which published writers such as Rikki Ducornet, Brian Evenson, and Michael Moorcock.

VanderMeer also co-edited (with Ann VanderMeer) ground-breaking anthologies such as Best American Fantasy 1 and 2, Steampunk 1 and 2, New Weird, The Weird, The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, The Time Traveler’s Almanac, The Big Book of Science Fiction, The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, and The Big Book of Modern Fantasy. They also founded the influential Weirdfictionreview.com website and their Cheeky Frawg Press published Amos Tutuola and many works in translation, including Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck’s first collection in English and Finnish icon Leena Krohn’s complete stories in one mammoth volume.