VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps.

He has spoken at the Guggenheim, the Library of Congress, and the Arthur C. VanderMeer served as the 2016-2017 Trias Writer in Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Other titles include Wonderbook, the world’s first fully illustrated creative writing guide. He has coedited several iconic anthologies with his wife, the Hugo Award winning editor. His nonfiction has appeared in New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post. Annihilation won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, has been translated into 35 languages, and was made into a film from Paramount Pictures directed by Alex Garland. His most recent novel, the national bestseller Borne, received wide-spread critical acclaim and his prior novels include the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance).

NYT bestselling writer Jeff VanderMeer has been called “the weird Thoreau” by the New Yorker for his engagement with ecological issues. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers-they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding-but it's the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one anotioner, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist a surveyor a psychologist, the de facto leader and our narrator, a biologist. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third expedition in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization.

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades.

The southern reach trilogy