Katherine Neville was born in St. Louis on April 4, 1945. (Anyone who has read The Eight will know how important that date is.) According to the review of The Eight in the St. Paul Pioneer Press-Dispatch (January 22, 1989), she attended the University of Denver and several other colleges which she won't name, and did graduate work in black literature in Africa, Europe, and America, in both English and French. As a computer expert, she has worked for IBM and Honeywell, among others, and, like her heroine Catherine Velis, set up a computer system for the Algerian government. She was also a vice president of the Bank of America in San Francisco, in charge of the division of travelers' checks. Katherine Neville has also been a model, a commercial photographer, and a painter. According to a Publishers Weekly interview (December 23, 1988), she has "lived in North Africa, London, Paris and over half of the 50 states of the Union. She normally reads five books a week, and enjoys writing for 12 hours at a stretch." Obviously, she is an opera fan (and so am I); it comes out in all of her books. Interestingly, she did not use a computer to write The Eight; most of it was written in a treehouse in Sausalito. "People think my life is exotic, but I've spent 90% of it at a desk or in a conference room," Neville says in the Publishers Weekly interview. She lives in Virginia and overseas. (Information comes from the blurbs in Neville's books, the Publishers Weekly interview, the review in the St. Paul Pioneer Press-Dispatch, and the OCLC database.)
For more information about Katherine Neville, see the biography at Ballantine's Magic Circle site.
NOTE: I would like to put an end to a rumor I've heard. I've been getting messages from people asking me if Katherine Neville writes under the pseudonyms Kathryn Harvey and Barbara Wood. The answer is NO! Barbara Wood is an author who was born in 1947 and lives in California; Kathryn Harvey is Wood's pseudonym. By the way, I highly recommend Wood's novels The Prophetess and Perfect Harmony.
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