Rick Riordan Biography
Rick
Riordan is the multi-award-winning
author of the Tres Navarre mystery series for adults and the #1 New York Times
bestselling Percy Jackson and the Olympians series for children.
For fifteen years, Rick taught English and history at public and private middle
schools in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Texas. In 2002, Saint Mary’s Hall
honored him with the school’s first Master Teacher Award.
His adult fiction has won the top three national awards in the mystery genre –
the Edgar, the Anthony and the Shamus. He has presented workshops for such
organizations as the International Reading Association, the California
Association of Independent Schools, the National Council for Teachers of
English, the Colonial Williamsburg Teacher Institute and the Texas Library
Association. His
short fiction has appeared in Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine and Ellery
Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In 2003, he was inducted into the Texas
Institute of Letters.
His Percy Jackson
series features a twelve-year-old dyslexic boy who discovers he is the
modern-day son of a Greek god. The novels draw on Riordan’s experience teaching
Greek mythology and his interaction with students who have learning differences.
The Lightning Thief was a New York Times Notable Book for 2005. Film
rights have been purchased by Twentieth Century Fox and a feature film is in
development. The Sea of Monsters was a Child Magazine Best Book for
Children for 2006 and a Publishers Weekly and BookSense national bestseller, and
The Titan's Curse was a #1 New York Times children's series bestseller.
The fourth volume, The Battle of the Labyrinth, published in May 2008.
In September 2008, Scholastic published the first in a new series, "The 39
Clues", for 8-12 year olds. Calling on his years in the classroom, Riordan
has filled the books with details that are both educational and entertaining.
"My goal in the classroom was always to make sure they were having so much fun
that they didn't realize they were learning," he said. "I saw 'The 39 Clues' as
a potential vehicle for doing some education in a fun way — to take some of
these amazing stories from history, dust them off and make them alive."
Each volume of the 10-book mystery series will feature a different historical
figure. Scholastic plan to publish one volume every 2-3 months.
Riordan has written the first volume and outlined the plots for the remainder of
the series, which will be written by other authors.
The story, devised in part by Scholastic's editors, follows the exploits of Amy
and Dan Cahill, two orphans, 14 and 11, who are competing against other branches
of the sprawling Cahill family to discover the first of 39 clues - which when
revealed will provide the key to a secret that will lead to ultimate power.
The books are designed to compliment the Internet game,
www.the39clues.com.
Each book reveals one clue, leaving gamers to find the remaining 29 online.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Riordan explains that writing a
book with a committee was not selling out, but was in some ways "liberating."
Despite the fact that he is writing full time, he says he still feels like a
teacher because he meets so many children on book tours. "I see hundreds of kids
at a time rather than knowing one classroom very well," he said.
"My modus operandi hasn't really changed that much from when I was an English
teacher. I wanted my students to leave my classroom loving reading and
wanting to read more, and if they left my classroom thinking that reading is
boring, then I haven't done my job."
Rick Riordan lives in San Antonio with his wife and two
sons.
This biography was last updated on 09/01/2008.
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