He was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, but spent much of his childhood in the Fiji Islands, where his parents worked for the Peace Corps. This experience, and the resulting trip back to the United States through Asia, Africa, and Europe, deeply influenced him.

In 2003, VanderMeer married Ann Kennedy, then editor for the small Buzzcity Press and magazine the Silver Web. Ann VanderMeer is currently the editor of Weird Tales magazine, and a respected anthologist and publisher in her own right. The VanderMeers live in Tallahassee, Florida.

He is the author of the best-selling City of Saints and Madmen, set in his signature creation, the imaginary city of Ambergris, in addition to several other novels from Bantam, Tor, and Pan Macmillan. He has won two World Fantasy Awards, an NEA-funded Florida Individual Writers’ Fellowship, and, most recently, the Le Cafard cosmique award in France and the Tähtifantasia Award in Finland, both for City of Saints. He has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, Bram Stoker Award, IHG Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and many others. Novels such as Veniss Underground and An Afterword have made the year’s best lists of Amazon.com, The Austin Chronicle, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Publishers Weekly, among others. His work, both books and short stories, has been translated into over twenty languages. The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases may be his most famous anthology, and is considered a cult classic, still in print along with his Leviathan original fiction series.

VanderMeer is the founding editor and publisher of the Ministry of Whimsy Press, up until recently on hiatus. VanderWorld (under occupation): MINISTRY OF WHIMSY ON HIATUS It is currently an imprint of Wyrm Publishing. Ecstatic Days » Blog Archive » Ministry of Whimsy Press: The Resurrection One of the Ministry's publications, The Troika by Stephen Chapman, won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1997.

VanderMeer's reviews and essays have appeared in The Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, and many others. He is a regular columnist for the Amazon book-culture blog, and has served as a judge for the Eisner Awards, among others, and has been a guest speaker at such diverse events as the Brisbane Writers Festival, Finncon in Helsinki, and the American Library Association annual conference. His multi-media presentations and lectures on a variety of topics have been given all over the world, and he makes frequent public appearances, including teaching at the Clarion Workshop and Trinity Prep School.

Recently, VanderMeer began to experiment in other media, resulting in a movie based on his novel Shriek that featured an original soundtrack by rock band The Church and a Play Station Europe animation of his story “A New Face in Hell” by animator Joel Veitch. Currently, VanderMeer is writing a Predator tie-in novel for Dark Horse Comics called Predator: South China Seas, and writing the introduction to Ben Templesmith’s second Gentleman Corpse graphic novel from IDW Publishing. Forthcoming projects in 2008 include seven anthologies (from The New Weird to a charity anthology for literacy, Last Drink Bird Head), a short film based on his story The Situation (out as a book from PS Publishing in the spring), and several novellas, including “Borne,” a sequel to The Situation.

VanderMeer's latest Ambergris novel, a noir thriller called Finch, was nominated for the 2009 Nebula Award for Best Novel. , For this book, VanderMeer approached rock band Murder By Death about recording a soundtrack for release with a limited edition of the book. The band obliged with the October 2009 release of Finch.

Has been published in award-winning Postscripts.

Novels

• Dradin, In Love (1996, collected in all editions of City of Saints and Madmen)
• The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris, by Duncan Shriek (1999, collected in all editions of City of Saints and Madmen)
• Veniss Underground (2003)
• An Afterword (2006)
• Predator: South China Seas (2008)
• Finch (2009)

Nonfiction

• Why Should I Cut Your Throat? (2004)
• Booklife (2009)

Collections

• The Book of Frog (1989)
• The Book of Lost Places (1996)
• City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris (2001)
• City of Saints and Madmen (2002, substantially expanded from the 2001 edition)
• City of Saints and Madmen (2004, expanded from the 2002 edition)
• The Day Dali Died (2003)
• Secret Life (2004)
• Why Should I Cut Your Throat? (nonfiction, 2004)
• VanderMeer 2005 (promotional sampler, 2005)
• Secret Lives (2006)
• The Surgeon's Tale and Other Stories (with Cat Rambo, 2007)
• The Third Bear (2010, Tachyon Publications)

Short fiction

• "Mansions of the Moon" (2001) in Nemonymous 1
• "My Report on the Secret Life of Shane Hamill" (2006) in Eidolon I (ed. Jonathan Strahan, Jeremy G. Byrne)

Other projects

• The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals (with Ann VanderMeer, 2010, Tachyon Publications)

Anthologies edited

• Leviathan 1 (with Luke O'Grady, 1994)
• Leviathan 2 (with Rose Secrest, 1998)
• Leviathan 3 (with Forrest Aguirre, 2002)
• Album Zutique (2003)
• The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (with Mark Roberts, 2003)
• Fast Ships and Black Sails, (forthcoming, 2007) - Fantasy pirate stories
• The New Weird (with Ann VanderMeer, 2007)
• Best American Fantasy (with Ann VanderMeer, 2007)
• Best American Fantasy: v. 2 (with Ann VanderMeer, 2008)
• Last Drink Bird Head, (2008)
• Steampunk (with Ann VanderMeer, 2008)

2000 World Fantasy Award for the novella The Transformation of Martin Lake. He also shared a 2003 award for co-editing the Leviathan 3 anthology. His novel Finch was nominated for a 2009 World Fantasy Award.