John Sandford (1)

John Sandford, real name John Roswell Camp (born February 23, 1944), is a New York Times best-selling author, American novelist, a former journalist and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.

Camp was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the son of Anne Agnes (Barron) and Roswell Sandford Camp. His mother's family was German and Lithuanian. He received a bachelor's degree in American history and literature and a master's in journalism, both from the University of Iowa.

From 1971 to 1978, Camp wrote for The Miami Herald. In 1978, he moved to Minneapolis and started writing for The Saint Paul Pioneer Press as a features reporter; in 1980 he became a daily columnist. That year, he was a Pulitzer finalist for a series of stories on Native American culture. In 1985, during the Midwest farm crisis, he wrote a series entitled "Life on the Land: an American farm family," which followed a typical southwest Minnesota farm family through the course of a full year. For that work, he won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and the American Society of Newspaper Editors award for Non-Deadline Feature Writing. He worked part-time at the Pioneer Press in 1989 and left the next year.

Camp is an avid fiction reader himself. When asked in 2018 "What's your favorite book of all time?" by the New York Times, he responded, "An impossible question. If you put a gun to my head—say a .40-caliber Walther PPQ, or maybe a .45 ACP Colt Gold Cup—I'd say The Once and Future King, by T. H. White." Both weapons he mentioned make appearances in many of his novels.