“My love of fantasy became a love of literature. I began to write plays for my friends to put on. When I was about eleven, we did a dramatic version of Beowulf with a giant foam-rubber dragon puppet and lots of gruesome alliteration. It was supposed to be Anglo-Saxon. Around the same time, we did A Midsummer Night’s Fever, which was supposed to be A Midsummer Night’s Dream recast with John Travolta. I don’t remember much about it except that Puck sang in a high-pitched voice like the Bee Gees.”

– M.T. Anderson

Matthew Tobin Anderson, known as M.T. Anderson, was born on November 4^th, 1968. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and had a father who was an engineer and a mother who was an Episcopal priest. Anderson attended Harvard College, the University of Cambridge in England, and Syracuse University. After college he worked at Candlewick press before writing his first novel Thirsty in 1977. He has many other jobs during this time as well including: disc jockey for WCUW Radio and an instructor at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he now serves as a board member and as a music critic for the Improper Bostanian. He now lives in Boston and serves on the Board for The National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance, a national non-profit organization that advocates for literacy, literature, and libraries.

Meet the Author

Awards include:

Honor book, 2002 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award (Handel, Who knew what he liked)

Winner, 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Feed)

Finalist, 2002 National Book Award (Feed)

Honor Book, 2003 Boston Globe—Horn Book Award (Feed)

Winner, 2006 National Book Award (The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Volume 1: The Pox Party)

Honor book, 2007 Michael L. Printz Award for literary excellence in young adult literature (The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Volume 1: The Pox Party)

Honor book, 2009 Michael L. Printz Award (The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves)

Novels:

·   Thirsty (1997)

·  Burger Wuss (1999)

·   Feed (2002)

·   The Game of Sunken Places (2004)

·   Whales on Stilts (2005 first in series)

·  The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen (2006)

·   The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1: The Pox Party (2006)

·   The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves (2008)

·  Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware (2009)

·  The Suburb Beyond the Stars (2010)

·  Agent Q, or, The Smell of Danger (2010).

·  The Empire of Gut and Bone (2011).

·  Zombie Mommy (2011).

He also writes picture books and pre-teen books.

Matthew Tobin Anderson is known for making his writing challenging for his readers. He is known for having readers of varying ages and encourages them to look at the world in new ways through his literature. Anderson also tends to write in a sophisticated manner. his stories are witty and have adult storylines, which he uses to show that young people are more intelligent than some might think. His two books Thirsty and Feed are both directed towards the young adult age group and like other young adult novels Anderson has written these books satire is directed towards society.

“My original idea was to write a story about a future time in which we had become so connected to a fast-paced world of media images that no one could read any more,” the author explains. “I wanted to depict how soul-destroying it is to be part of this media world that appears to be very inviting, but which in fact tends to strip away the eccentricities of personality and encourage people to become a market, rather than a human.”

While writing Feed, Anderson did a lot of fieldwork that was pop-culture based and oriented on media that young adults often submerge themselves in. The teen magazines he used for research were Seventeen, Maxim, Teen Vogue; these magazines made it easier for him to convey an accurate teen voice in his novel for the various characters. He also admitted to listening to cell phone conversations in malls. Feed presented a unique challenge for Anderson. Though he has written other books about different time periods, Feed was a new challenge that required Anderson to create a character in a time period that has not happened yet. Feed began as a short story but grew too big of a project to be kept as a short story.

“I didn’t live near many kids and I was socially inept anyway, so my fantasy world was very involved and quite internal. I apparently became a little too dreamy and distracted-so much so that in fifth grade, my teachers became concerned that I was borderline autistic or had some serious learning disability; and my grandmother, seeing me whisper to some imaginary androids in the woods, became convinced that I was possessed by evil spirits. For the next ten years or so, she would regularly exorcise me.”

Anderson is a shy individual who says that he generally does not like his books once he is done with them. By the time he is done with one project he finds himself itching to move onto the next, which is why he writes in so many different genres. In the future he plans on continuing writing for young adults and children but also would like to venture into writing adult audience.

Timeline:

• July 20, 1969- Apollo 11 is the first team of astronauts to ever land on the moon.
• January 21^, 1972- The First Video Game
• 1982- Internet protocol suite introduced
• Aug 6, 1991- The World Wide Web
• December 4, 1996- Launch of Mars Pathfinder
• September 7, 1998- Googe is founded
• November 20, 1998- First piece of the International Space Station is launched
• 2002- “Feed” the novel was written
• February, 2004- Facebook was launched
• September 2012- Facebook hit 1 billion active users

-Amanda Morris