Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer is an American author of speculative fiction and New Weird literature, best known for the Southern Reach trilogy. He won the Shirley Jackson Award for Novel for Annihilation (2014), the first volume of the trilogy, which also won the Nebula Award and was adapted into a 2018 film directed by Alex Garland. Born in 1968 in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania and raised partly in the Fiji Islands, VanderMeer grew up in Gainesville, Florida, where he continues to live. He is a committed environmentalist and his fiction frequently deals with ecological catastrophe, mutation, and the uncanny. Annihilation is about a secret expedition into Area X, an anomalous zone where previous expeditions have gone terribly wrong. His other works include City of Saints and Madmen, Finch, Borne, and The Strange Bird. VanderMeer has also been an influential editor of the Weird Fiction anthologies (with Ann VanderMeer) and a major figure in the New Weird movement.