John Sandford is the pen name of John Roswell Camp, who was born on February 23, 1944, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He studied American history and literature at the University of Iowa and later earned a master's degree in journalism there.
He spent nearly twenty years as a newspaper reporter, first at The Miami Herald and then at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, where he became a daily columnist. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1980 for a series on Native American culture and won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for "Life on the Land," a series about a farm family in southwest Minnesota.
In 1989 he published his first two novels: The Fool's Run, under his own name, which began the Kidd series, and Rules of Prey, as John Sandford, which introduced Lucas Davenport. He left the newspaper in 1990 to write fiction full time.
Besides the Prey novels, he writes the Virgil Flowers and Letty Davenport series. He co-wrote the science fiction novel Saturn Run with Ctein and the young adult Singular Menace trilogy with Michele Cook.
