Matthew Tobin Anderson

Matthew Tobin Anderson (born November 4, 1968), is an American writer of children's books that range from picture books to young adult novels.

Anderson worked at Candlewick Press before his first novel Thirsty (1997) was accepted for publication there.

He has also worked as a disc jockey for WCUW radio; as an instructor at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he now serves on the Board; and as a music critic for The Improper Bostonian.

He currently lives in Cambridge (Mass.) and is on the Board of the National Children's Book and Literacy Alliance, a national non-profit organization that advocates for literacy, literature, and libraries.

Anderson is known for challenging his readers, of varying ages, to look at the world in new ways.

Anderson has also remarked "We write because we can't decipher things the first time around."

His novels directed at young adults, such as Thirsty and Feed, tend to direct their satire at society.

He's also written children's picture books such as Handel, Who Knew What He Liked, and novels directed toward pre-teen readers such as The Game of Sunken Places.

Anderson tends to write with sophisticated wit and storylines, making the point that young people are more intelligent than some might think.

In response to the question of why he gives so much credit to his young audience, Anderson stated in an interview with Julie Prince: "Our survival as a nation rests upon the willingness of the young to become excited and engaged by new ideas we never considered as adults."

While he was writing Feed, Anderson took in younger, pop-culture oriented media, such as Seventeen, Maxim, and Teen Vogue.

He used these media sources to convey an accurate teenage voice, but even more depleted and abbreviated.

He won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2006 for The Pox Party, the first of two "Octavian Nothing" books, which are historical novels set in Revolution-era Boston.

Anderson is known for using wit and sarcasm in his stories, as well as advocating that young adults are capable of mature comprehension.

Anderson was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

His father Will Anderson was an engineer, and his mother Juliana Anderson was an Episcopal priest.

He attended St. Mark's School, Harvard College, the University of Cambridge (England), and Syracuse University.

He's used this method many times, including reading 18th century novels during his writing of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing.

A shy person, Anderson has stated that he greatly prefers writing to public speaking.

As a writer he does not shy from taking on difficult questions and deeper, more mature concepts and themes.

Unlike many other young-adult writers, Anderson views the characters he creates simply as figures moving and acting on his terms.

The only exception to this view of his characters has been his main character in The Astonishing Life, Octavian Nothing.

Anderson faces unique challenges in writing for the young adult market, especially concerning the topics he chooses.

He has heavily researched the time periods of his novels in order to accurately portray his characters.

Similarly to Feed, Anderson had to put himself in the shoes of a young person from a different time period when he wrote The Astonishing Life.

However, this novel challenged him to explore the dialect of a time period that had already happened, rather than a time period that has yet to come.

Anderson pointed out that he actually tends to dislike his books after he's finished with them, a declaration that has been seen as modest; he feels distanced from the work and is usually eager to move on to another project.

This is his reasoning behind writing in so many different genres.

Anderson has also indicated that he hopes to not only continue writing for young adults and children, but also to write for an adult audience in the future.

Feed is a young-adult novel focusing on the lives of teenagers in a future America.

Within this dystopian society, young people are implanted with "the feed", a computer chip that connects them to a global network of advertisements, images, audio messages, and text-based communication.

The government uses the feed to profile everyone to show what their interests and dislikes are.

Anyone who tries to 'beat' the feed can be denied later when they try to get information or help from the sources.

The novel's themes are corporate power and consumerism.

Feed has also been regarded as a literary source for young adults to not only expand their knowledge of citizenship outside of the everyday youth status, but also increase their capacity for social change.

The novel also focuses on the dependent nature of the characters; everyone is so dependent on the feed's transmissions that everything else in society decays.

Feed received praise for Anderson's imaginative wit.

The unique use of "futuristic" language is noted as one of the novel's strong points.

Feed won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award.

Feed was also named one of the ALA Best Books for Young Adults.