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Nancy Farmer grew up on the Arizona-Mexico border. Her father managed a hotel in Yuma, where she worked the desk from the age of nine. She couldn't help but overhearing stories from the cowboys, rodeo people, railroad, and circus workers who patronized the hotel. She joined the Peace Corps in the 1960's, and served in India for two years. When her tour of duty was complete, Farmer next spent 17 years living and working in Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

It was in Zimbabwe, while living amongst the Shona, that a Shave visited Farmer. A Shave (sha-vay) is a wandering spirit that may be good or bad, visiting the living, imparting their skills onto the people they visit. Farmer was lucky. The spirit that visited her gave her a gift for storytelling, and she started typing.

Nancy published a few novels and a picture book with a Zimbabwean publisher, and then she stopped writing for a while. Farmer, her husband, and her son moved back to the United States. She still could not write. She kept at it, and soon published her first American title, Do You Know Me?. In 1994, the title that really got her noticed, The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm was published. This title had been one of the books originally published earlier when she lived in Zimbabwe. Farmer revised it and published it with her new American publisher. It is set in Zimbabwe, in the future, where the president's chief of security's children, bored with living in a too secure compound, decide to go out into the city of Harare. They are kidnapped by minions of She Elephant, and three mutant detectives are hired to get them back. Wonderful stuff: it was a Newbery Honor title in 1995.

The Warm Place, a children's novel of a giraffe trying to get back home, and Runnery Granary, a children's picture book, quickly followed. Her next YA title, A Girl Named Disaster, was published in 1996. Farmer returned to her beloved Africa in this novel. Nhamo, an eleven-year-old Shona girl, flees from Mozambique and goes to Zimbabwe to escape being married off to a cruel man who already has three wives. She travels down the Musengezi river, and is swept into Lake Cabora Bossa, where her problems really begin. The spirit world, including her deceased mother, aids her in the risky journey to freedom. This powerful novel was named a Newbery Honor book.

Farmer returned to the borderland of the United States and Mexico for the setting of her next novel, House of the Scorpion. A clone lives in a drug empire named Opium between the USA and Atzlan, which used to be known as Mexico. Oddly enough, his intelligence was not destroyed at birth, which is usually what happens to clones; plus, he has a name: Matt. He has been spared because he is the clone of El Patron, the ruler of this fiefdom, and he has plans for his clone. How do you think El Patron has lived for a hundred and forty years? Farmer got the big prize for this powerful novel: it won the National Book Award and was an honor book for the Printz award for Young Adult fiction. Her latest book, Sea of Trolls, is another example of Farmer's versatility. Set during the Viking age, it is a wonderful epic story of life and death, despair and hope, couched in a time when myth was still part of everyday life.

When Farmer was touched by that Shave under African skies, she was given the gift of storytelling. It is a gift that continues to offer unusual stories inhabited by characters we care about.

Nhamo's mother is dead, and her father is gone. She is a virtual slave in her small African village. Before her twelfth birthday, Nhamo learns that she must marry a cruel man with three other wives-and decides desperately to run away. Alone on the river, in a stolen boat, she is swept into the uncharted heart of a great lake. There, she battles drowning, starvation, and wild animals, and comes to know Africa's mystical, luminous spirits. Nancy Farmer's masterful storytelling makes this a truly spellbinding novel-and readers will be cheering for Nhamo from beginning to end. A gripping adventure, equally a survival story and a spiritual voyage. Nhamo is a stunning creation-while she serves as a fictional ambassador from a foreign culture, she is supremely human. An unforgettable work.

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