Nancy Farmer

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Nancy Farmer (born July 9, 1941 in Phoenix , Arizona ) is an American writer for young people .

biography

Due to uncertain living conditions in Phoenix, Nancy Farmer grew up in Yuma . Even during elementary school she developed a great interest in stories by listening to the stories of travelers in her father's hotel. In contrast to her siblings, the young Nancy Farmer, despite her intelligence, was not allowed to skip school grades, which meant that the girl was bored in school. In addition to numerous extracurricular activities, she read a lot and worked her way through authors such as CS Forrester , JD Salinger , John Steinbeck , George Eliot , Tennessee Williams , Maupassant, and Victor Hugo .

She graduated from Reed College in Portland in 1963 with a BA . Instead of taking a regular job, Nancy Farmer joined the Peace Corps after graduating and was sent to India until 1965 . After returning to the US , she initially sold newspapers at Berkeley before getting a job in the entomology department and taking courses in chemistry . Although Nancy Farmer felt very comfortable in Berkeley, she decided to go to Africa in search of new challenges .

She spent more than a year doing limnological studies at Lake Cabora Bassa in Mozambique . From 1975 to 1978 she worked on the investigation of tsetse flies in Zambezi, Zimbabwe .

Africa & start of writing career

She spent some time in the Zimbabwean capital, where she met her future husband, Harold Farmer. Just a few weeks after their first meeting, they married in 1976. In order to avoid her depression after the birth of her son Daniel, Nancy Farmer began to study literature intensively and toyed with the idea of ​​writing herself. She took on writers like Stephen King and Edgar Rice Burroughs to practice writing and a little later took part with some stories in the writing competition " Writers of the Future " and won one of the four annual prizes. With the money, the farmers moved to the USA. For a while, Nancy Farmer worked at Stanford University's Department of Genetics . After Nancy Farmer wrote the short story “Do You Know Me?” won another competition, she was able to devote herself entirely to writing.

After a few years in the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona , the author now lives in Menlo Park , California .

Works

  • 1993 Do You Know Me
  • 1994 The Ear, The Eye, and the Arm
  • 1995 The Warm Place
  • 1996 A Girl Named Disaster
    • Nhamo or The Spirit of the Leopard, German by Heike Brandt; Beltz and Gelberg, Weinheim, Basel 1999. ISBN 3-407-80855-0
  • 1996 Runnery Granary
  • 2002 The House of the Scorpion
  • 2013 The Lord of Opium
    • Continuation of "The Scorpion House"

The Trolls Saga

  • 2004 The Sea of ​​Trolls
  • 2007 The Land of the Silver Apples
  • 2009 The Islands of the Blessed

Awards

  • 2002 National Book Award for Young People's Literature for The House of the Scorpion
  • 2004 Buxtehuder Bulle for the best narrative German-language book for young people of 2003 for Das Skorpionenhaus

review

“Nancy Farmer [...] knows [...] how to build a fantastic world on a historical background in which the reader can experience not only the rough Northmen, their customs and beliefs, but also a representation of Nordic mythology [...]. The Drachenmeer is [...] a historical fantasy novel [...] which does not need to hide behind some award-winning works. "

- Christoph Weidler in Fantasyguide.de

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.fantasyguide.de/863
personal data
SURNAME Farmer, Nancy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 9, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Phoenix , Arizona , USA