Book WeekA celebration of children's literature

2014 author: Nancy Farmer

I was born in Arizona and grew up in a hotel on the Mexican border.
I attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon. After graduating, instead of taking a regular job, I joined the Peace Corps and was sent to India for two years. When I returned I lived in a commune in Berkeley, California, and worked for a lab making, among other things, bubonic plague vaccine.

A friend and I tried to hitchhike to Africa, but the ship we selected turned out to be stolen and was boarded by the Coast Guard just outside the Golden Gate Bridge. They dumped us on shore and told us not to be such ninnies.

I studied chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked for the Entomology Department. My job was controlling insects that eat traffic islands. It’s amazing what kind of jobs you can find. I also worked briefly on an oceanography vessal. That job ended when the captain (Aka Captain Crunch) tore an eighty-foot chunk out of the side.

Eventually, I earned enough money to buy a ticket to Africa. I worked on controlling water weeds in Mozambique. My job was to keep them from clogging up a giant power plant on the Zambezi River. I then did tsetse fly control in the dense bush of Zimbabwe. I was introduced to my future husband Harold by his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend. One week later he proposed. We have one son, Daniel, who is in the U.S. Navy. We now live in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona, on a major drug route for the Sinaloa Cartel.

My best-known books are The House of the Scorpion and its sequel The Lord of Opium, The Sea of Trolls trilogy, The Ear, the Eye and the Arm, and A Girl Named Disaster. Honors include the National Book Award and three Newbery Honors.