Nancy Farmer is an American author of children's and young-adult books and science fiction. She has written three Newbery Honor Books and she won the U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature for The House of the Scorpion, published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers in 2002.
Farmer was born in Phoenix, Arizona. She earned her B.A. at Reed College and later studied chemistry and entomology at the University of California, Berkeley. She enlisted in the Peace Corps, and subsequently worked in Mozambique and Rhodesia, where she studied biological methods of controlling the tsetse fly between 1975–1978. She met her future husband, Harold Farmer, at the University of Rhodesia. After a week-long courtship, the two were married. Farmer currently lives in the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona with her husband; they have one son, Daniel.