VanderMeer began writing in the late 1980s while still in high school and quickly became a prolific contributor to small-press magazines. 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 attended the University of Florida for three years and, in 1992, took part in the Clarion Writers Workshop. After returning to the United States, he spent time in Ithaca, New York, and Gainesville, Florida. 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.

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'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 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'. 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. Among VanderMeer's other novels are Shriek: An Afterword and Borne. The trilogy's first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, and was adapted into a Hollywood film by director Alex Garland. Initially associated with the New Weird literary genre, VanderMeer crossed over into mainstream success with his bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy. Jeff VanderMeer (born J) is an American author, editor, and literary critic. Nebula Award for Best Novel, Shirley Jackson Award, World Fantasy Award

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