Novelist John Sandford was born John Camp in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1944.  Sandford attended University of Iowa and received his Bachelor’s degree in American Studies.  While Sandford served in the military in Korea, he worked as a journalist for his base paper.  When Sandford returned from the service, he worked for the Cape Girardeau newspaper for nearly  a year before deciding to return to the University of Iowa.

Sandford received his Masters in Journalism and worked for seven years for the Miami Herald as a general assignment reporter where he covered the police beat – murders and drug cases – with his colleague, Edna Buchanan.

In 1978, Sandford moved to Minnesota where he worked as a features reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer.  The Pioneer gave Sandford his own column in 1980, and that same year he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a feature he wrote on Native American communities in Minnesota and North Dakota.  Sandford’s work paid off in 1986, when he received the Pulitzer Prize for his series of articles on the Midwest farm crisis titled “Life on the Land:  An American Farm Family.”

Sandford stopped writing as a journalist for the Pioneer in 1989, and started writing novels.  His first two novels, “The Fool’s Run” and “Rules of Prey” were accepted and due to be published three months apart.  The publisher ran “Prey” under the pseudonym Sandford and “Fool” was printed under Camp’s name.
“Rules of Prey” became immensely popular due to its charismatic detective character, Lucas Davenport.  Sandford continued to write an additional 16 novels in the Prey series and became a national bestseller.  Due to the popularity of the Prey series, Sandford’s publisher reran “The Fool’s Run” under the pseudonym and subsequent sequels of the Fool series , three additional titles.

In addition to his popular series, Sandford has published four additional novels, including “Dark of the Moon” in 2007, which contains a protagonist character from his last Prey book.  He has also published two nonfiction books – “The Eye of the Heart” and “Plastic Surgery”. John Sandford has been praised as a true story-teller and continues to write from his home in Minnesota.