The Hunger Games

Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons was born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1948 and grew up in a number of cities and towns across the American Midwest, including Brimfield, Illinois, which became the model for the fictional 'Elm Haven' in his works 'Summer of Night' (1991) and 'A Winter Haunting' (2002). He received a Bachelor's degree in English from Wabash College in 1970, where in his final year he won a national 'Phi Beta Kappa Award' for excellence in fiction, journalism, and art. He received his Master's degree in 1971 from Washington University in St. Louis. He then worked for 18 years as a primary school teacher. He taught for 2 years in Missouri, 2 years in Buffalo, New York (one year as a teacher of disabled children in the BOCES programme, the second year as a sixth-grade teacher), and 14 years in colourado. The last four years of his teaching career were spent building, coordinating, and teaching in APEX, an extensive programme for gifted pupils that worked with 19 primary schools and up to 15,000 potential students. During his years of teaching, he received several awards from the colourado Education Association and was a finalist for the colourado Teacher of the Year award. He also worked as a national consultant for literature and linguistics.