Jeff VanderMeer

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

In 2019, VanderMeer was a judge for the National Book Award for Fiction.

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." 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."

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.

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 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.

In 2003, VanderMeer married Ann Kennedy, then editor for the small Buzzcity Press and magazine the Silver Web. The couple lives in Tallahassee, Florida. They have two cats. One is named Neo.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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