Katherine Neville’s early career as an international consultant in computers took her to live and work in multiple countries on three continents, and half the states in the US. She numbered among her clients and employers IBM, OPEC, the Bank of America, the Algerian government, and the US Department of Energy. Between jobs, she supported herself in a bevy of professions, including commercial photographer, portrait painter, waiter, busboy, and fashion model.
Neville’s colorful, swashbuckling adventure novels, in the epic “Quest” tradition, have graced the bestseller lists in forty languages. But her books remain hard to pigeonhole:
Neville herself has been dubbed “the female” Umberto Eco, Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, and Stephen Spielberg. Her work has been reviewed and has received awards in categories as diverse as Mystery, Thriller, Historic, Romance, Science Fiction as well as classical literature. Publishers Weekly described Neville’s works as having “paved the way for books like The Da Vinci Code.” In a national poll by the noted Spanish journal, El Pais, her novel, The Eight, was voted one of the top ten books of all time.
Neville has been an invited speaker at many universities and other venues around the world, including the Today show; National Public Radio; the Voice of America; the World Affairs Conference in Colorado; The Georgia Tech Women’s Leadership Conference; the Idaho Writers Rendezvous; the Orkney Science Fair in Scotland; the Ateneo de Madrid; the University of Menendez & Pelayo in Spain; the First International Mevlana (Rumi) Symposium in Konya, Turkey; the Turkish Culture Ministry in Ankara; The James River Writers’ Conference; the Smithsonian Associates lecture series; and The Library of Congress.
Katherine Neville is honored to be the first author chosen to become a member the Advisory Board of the Smithsonian Libraries in Washington, DC. As a great devotee of reading and research herself, Neville has co-created several awards and grants, including most recently: Art in Literature: the Mary Lynn Kotz Award presented by the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Neville-Pribram Mid-Career Grant presented by the Smithsonian Libraries.
Neville resides in Washington DC and Virginia, where she is restoring a fabled Japanese house from the 1960s while writing her new novel set in the art world of the 1600s.
Read more about Katherine in the extended biography.
A specially written, illustrated biography is also available with her e-books from Open Road Publishers.
