Nancy Farmer

October 6, 2014

Book Week 2014 Welcomes Nancy Farmer

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

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

Nancy studied chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked for the Entomology Department. Her job was controlling insects that eat traffic islands. It’s amazing what kind of jobs you can find. She 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, Nancy earned enough money to buy a ticket to Africa where she worked on controlling water weeds in Mozambique. Her job was to keep them from clogging up a giant power plant on the Zambezi River. She then did tsetse fly control in the dense bush of Zimbabwe. Nancy was introduced to her future husband Harold by his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, and one week later he proposed. Nancy and Harold have one son, Daniel, who is in the U.S. Navy. They now live in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona, on a major drug route for the Sinaloa Cartel.

Nancy's 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. Her honors include the National Book Award and three Newbery Honors.

View photos from Book Week 2014 with Nancy Farmer