Neal Shusterman (born November 12, 1962) is an American writer of young adult fiction. He won the 2015 National Book Award for Young People's Literature for his book Challenger Deep and his novel, Scythe, was a 2017Michael L. Printz Honor book. He won the Margaret Edwards Award in 2024 "honoring his significant and lasting contribution to writing for teens."

Early life

Shusterman was born on November 12, 1962, and raised in Brooklyn, New York City. His family is Jewish. From a young age, Shusterman was an avid reader. At the age of 16, Shusterman and his family moved to Mexico City. He finished high school there at the American School Foundation and is quoted as saying that "Having an international experience changed my life, giving me a fresh perspective on the world, and a sense of confidence I might not have otherwise." He attended the University of California, Irvine, where he double-majored in psychology and theater, and was also on the varsity swim team.

Career

After college, Shusterman worked as an assistant at the Irvin Arthur Associates, a talent agency in Los Angeles, where Lloyd Segan became his agent. Within a year, Shusterman had his first book deal and a screenwriting job. He lives in Florida. Shusterman has received numerous honors for his books, including the 2005 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award and 2008 California Young Reader Medal for The Schwa Was Here, as well as the 2015 National Book Award for Challenger Deep. He served as a judge for the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship in 2012. Unwind has won more than 30 awards and is in development with Constantin Film as a television series. In 2016, it was announced that his novel Scythe is in development with Universal as a feature film. Challenger Deep was acquired by Disney+ in 2019, and Will McCormack has been selected to write the script. He has been nominated four times (twice in 2019; 2020; 2023) in different categories of the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis and won the Youth Jury Prize in 2019. In March 2023, the German translation of the book Roxy, written with his son Jarrod Shusterman, was nominated by the youth jury. Shusterman has also written for TV, including the Disney Channel Original Movie Pixel Perfect, and episodes of Goosebumps, Animorphs, and R. L. Stine's The Haunting Hour: The Series. Fellow author Orson Scott Card invited Shusterman to write novels parallel to Ender's Game about other characters from the series, but schedules didn't permit it, and Card wrote Ender's Shadow and the subsequent series himself.

Awards

Fiction series

The N.O.A.H. Files trilogy (with Eric Elfman)

The Accelerati trilogy (with Eric Elfman)

Antsy Bonano

Arc of a Scythe

Dark Fusion

The Shadow Club Duology

The Skinjacker trilogy

The Star Shards Chronicles

The Unwind dystology

The X-Files

Space: Above and Beyond

Other novels

Picture books

Short stories

Short story collections

Games

Nonfiction

Poems

Screenwriting credits

Television

Film