Suzanne Collins

Suzanne Collins was born on August 10, 1962, in Hartford, Connecticut. Her father, Michael Collins, was a lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force who served in Korea and Vietnam. His career kept the family on the move between the eastern United States and Europe, including a stretch in Brussels. Growing up close to military life gave her a concrete sense of what war, hunger and poverty do to people, a thread that runs through almost everything she has written.

She studied theater at the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham, graduating in 1980. At Indiana University she majored in theater and telecommunications, finishing in 1985. She then moved to New York and earned an MFA in dramatic writing from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 1989.

Her career started in children's television in 1991. She wrote for Nickelodeon's Clarissa Explains It All and The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo, and for cartoons such as Little Bear, Oswald and Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!. She was head writer on Clifford's Puppy Days. A Christmas special she co-wrote, Santa, Baby!, from 2001, earned a Writers Guild of America nomination in animation.

While working on the series Generation O!, she met children's author James Proimos, who encouraged her to write books. The first was Gregor the Overlander, in 2003. The idea came from Alice in Wonderland: in a city like New York, you're more likely to fall down a manhole than a rabbit hole. A boy named Gregor ends up in a world underground, and The Underland Chronicles ran five books through 2007.

The Hunger Games came out in September 2008 from Scholastic. In Panem, a nation built on the ruins of North America, every district must send two young people into a televised fight to the death. Katniss Everdeen volunteers in place of her little sister. Collins has pointed to the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur and to her father's experience as inspirations. First-person, present-tense narration and chapters that end on cliffhangers turned the book into a sensation. Catching Fire followed in 2009 and Mockingjay in 2010. Time named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2010.

She adapted the first book for the screen herself. The 2012 film, directed by Gary Ross with Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss, launched a four-film series, since the final book was split in two. In 2016 she received the Authors Guild Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community, the first time it went to a young adult author.

Collins went back to Panem in 2020 with The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which follows a young Coriolanus Snow decades before Katniss and reached theaters in 2023. In March 2025 she released Sunrise on the Reaping, centered on Haymitch Abernathy and the 50th Hunger Games. The book won the Goodreads Choice Award and the Dragon Award in 2025 and the British Book Awards Children's Fiction Book of the Year in 2026. The film is set for November 20, 2026. She lives in Connecticut.