In the mid-1970s, stranded without work in Colorado, during a long economic downturn, Neville set up her own commercial photography business, with the advice and support of the many local photographers she’d worked with in the past, and for three years she shot high-end fashion and ski catalogues, department store ads, theatre programs for the Denver Civic Ballet, and the very first “Colorado Calendar.” In the early 1970s, Neville helped design a balance-of-trade system for the newly independent Algerian government, and shortly after her arrival in North Africa, the OPEC petroleum embargo took place, rationing the world’s oil supply–which planted the seed of her first novel, The Eight, and its sequel, The Fire, about a giant chess game taking place for centuries, all over the world, in a quest for power. It’s unlikely that I’ll ever run out of material for fiction.” “In all my careers,” she adds, “I’ve enjoyed a worm’s-eye view from inside the apple. But what I really wanted was to be a great storyteller. So later, whenever I found myself unemployed, I’d sign on with a local modeling agency, or I’d paint portraits, myself, of people’s children or dogs. “From an early age, I paid for my art lessons and supplies by modeling for portrait classes and fashion shoots. “Ever since I was really young, I could draw,” Neville says. She draws upon these myriad experiences to enrich her novels. Between jobs, she supported herself as a busboy and waiter, fashion model, commercial photographer, and professional artist. Among her employers and clients were IBM, the Long Island Railroad, the Algerian Ministry of Industry and Energy, the US Department of Energy, and the Bank of America. In the next twenty years, her career as an international consultant would take her to live and work in seven countries on three continents and half the states of the USA. Katherine Neville resides in Washington, DC and Virginia where she has restored the fabled 1960s house and studio of an award-winning Japanese potter, and where she is completing her new novel about artists in the 1600s.Īfter college, Neville worked in New York, in the fast-growing field of data processing, developing computer systems in transportation and energy. She is co-creator and sponsor of two international Library Awards, and co-producer of a series of short film clips by famous authors, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Smithsonian Libraries. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Authors Guild Foundation in New York. (See Awards, Honors & Bestsellers.)Īs a great supporter of libraries and books, Neville was the first author ever invited onto the Advisory Board of the Smithsonian Libraries in Washington, DC, where she has served a full three terms and is now emerita. Her colorful, complex adventure/quest novels have been translated into 40 languages, have received multiple awards and honors, and have remained on bestseller lists around the world. The Washington Post called her first book, The Eight, “a feminist answer to Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Publishers Weekly predicted that The Eight was “destined to become a cult classic, ” andmore recently, credited her work as having “paved the way for books like The Da Vinci Code.” She has been dubbed “the female” Umberto Eco, Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, and Stephen Spielberg. Neville’s groundbreaking work defies categorization. When her first book, The Eight, was published (1988) she left the computer world and became a full-time author. Katherine Neville’s 20-year data processing career, in the fields of energy and transportation, took her to live and work in seven countries on three continents, and half the states of the USA.
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