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Middle Grade/Young Adult Author
Nutmeg Book Award Finalist
Travels from: San Diego, CA

“Devious and fun –and highly recommended!” — Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Rot & Ruin

Greg van Eekhout was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, in neighborhoods with hippies, criminals, working people, and movie studios. His parents were Dutch-Indonesian.

Like many writers (and many people who aren’t writers, for that matter), Greg has done a number of things to put food on the table and keep a roof over his head. He has worked as an ice cream scooper (or dipper, as people who sell ice cream are sometimes called), a political fundraiser (or telemarketer), a comic book store clerk, a bookseller, a bookstore assistant manager, an educational multimedia developer, and a college teacher (of English and of multimedia development). Among other things. His next book, Fenris & Mott, comes out August, 2022.

Greg has lived his entire life in the Western half of the United States. He prefers beaches to deserts. He currently lives in San Diego.

My name last name is pronounced like this: Van, as in the kind of thing you drive, eek, as in, “Eek, killer robots are stomping the rutabagas!” and hout, like “out” with an h in front of it. The emphasis is on the Eek. Say it with me: van EEKhout.

Greg's Featured Titles

The Ghost Job

HarperCollins |
Middle Grade Mystery

Ghosts make the best thieves in this pitch-perfect middle grade adventure from the acclaimed author of Weird Kid. Perfect for fans of Gordon Korman and John David Anderson–and anyone looking for an Ocean’s 11-style heist!

Zenith and her friends may be dead—but lucky for them, even getting ghosted wasn’t enough to tear them apart.

The four of them were thick as thieves long before an unfortunate lab accident sent them careening into the afterlife. So when they hear about a machine that could return them to the land of the living, they are determined to steal it.

Unfortunately, the magical device belongs to a dangerous necromancer who’s out for their ectoplasm.

Fortunately, they’re great at heists. Because pulling off the score of their deathtimes is no job for an amateur.

Fenris & Mott

HarperCollins |
Childrens

A girl and her puppy face down the end of the world—which the puppy’s partly responsible for—in this middle grade story from acclaimed author Greg van Eekhout, perfect for fans of Gordon Korman and J.C. Cervantes.

When Mott finds a puppy abandoned in a recycling bin, she’s ready to do everything she can to protect him. What she doesn’t realize, however, is that this is the legendary wolf Fenris, who’s prophesied to bring about the end of the world by eating the moon.

Now Mott has found herself in charge of making sure the hungry pup—who’s busy munching on lampposts, cars, and water towers—doesn’t see all of California as an appetizer, while also hiding him from the Norse gods who are hot on his trail, determined to see the prophecy come true.

Mott vows to protect Fenris, rescue him from his destiny, and prevent the world from ending. But will she be able to keep her promise? Or has she bitten off more than she can chew?

Weird Kid

HarperCollins |
Middle/YA

From the author of Cog and Voyage of the Dogs, Weird Kid is a hilarious and heartfelt homage to everyone who feels like they don’t belong. Perfect for fans of Gordon Korman and Stuart Gibbs.

Jake Wind is trying to stay under the radar. Whose radar? Anyone who might be too interested in the fact that he has shapeshifting abilities he can’t control. Or that his parents found him as a ball of goo when he was a baby.

Keeping his powers in check is crucial, though, if he wants to live a normal life and go to middle school instead of being homeschooled (and if he wants to avoid being kidnapped and experimented on, of course).

Things feel like they’re going his way when he survives his first day of school without transforming and makes a new friend. But when mysterious sinkholes start popping up around town—sinkholes filled with the same extraterrestrial substance as Jake—and his neighbors, classmates, and even his family start acting a little, well, weird, Jake will have to learn to use his powers in order to save his town.

COG

HarperCollins |
Middle/YA

Five robots. One unforgettable journey. Their programming will never be the same.

Wall-E meets The Wild Robot in this middle grade instant classic about five robots on a mission to rescue their inventor from the corporation that controls them all.

Cog looks like a normal twelve-year-old boy. But his name is short for “cognitive development,” and he was built to learn.

But after an accident leaves him damaged, Cog wakes up in an unknown lab—and Gina, the scientist who created and cared for him, is nowhere to be found. Surrounded by scientists who want to study him and remove his brain, Cog recruits four robot accomplices for a mission to find her.

Cog, ADA, Proto, Trashbot, and Car’s journey will likely involve much cognitive development in the form of mistakes, but Cog is willing to risk everything to find his way back to Gina.

In this charming stand-alone adventure, Greg van Eekhout breathes life and wisdom into an unforgettable character and crafts a story sure to earn its place among beloved classics like Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan.

The Boy at the End of the World

Bloomsbury USA Childrens |
Middle/YA

Fisher is the last boy on earth-and things are not looking good for the human race. Only Fisher made it out alive after the carefully crafted survival bunker where Fisher and dozens of other humans had been sleeping was destroyed.

Luckily, Fisher is not totally alone. He meets a broken robot he names Click, whose programmed purpose-to help Fisher “continue existing”-makes it act an awful lot like an overprotective parent. Together, Fisher and Click uncover evidence that there may be a second survival bunker far to the west. In prose that skips from hilarious to touching and back in a heartbeat, Greg van Eekhout brings us a thrilling story of survival that becomes a journey to a new hope-if Fisher can continue existing long enough to get there.

Kid vs. Squid

Bloomsbury USA Childrens |
Middle/YA

Thatcher Hill is bored stiff of his summer job dusting the fake mermaids and shrunken heads at his uncle’s seaside Museum of Curiosities. But when a mysterious girl steals an artifact from the museum, Thatcher’s summer becomes an adventure that takes him from the top of the ferris wheel to the depths of the sea. Following the thief, he learns that she is a princess of the lost Atlantis. Her people have been cursed by an evil witch to drift at sea all winter and wash up on shore each summer to an even more terrible fate-working the midway games and food stands on the boardwalk. Can Thatcher help save them before he, too, succumbs to the witch’s curse?

With sharp, witty writing that reads like a middle-grade Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Greg van Eekhout’s first book for young readers is a wild ride packed with as many laughs as it has thrills.

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Let’s Talk Books!”

One of my favorite things about being an author is getting to talk to readers about books and writing, and I’d be delighted to visit your school, library, book festival, or conference.

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How an Idea Becomes a Book

What starts with an odd idea in a writer’s head can become the book on the shelf of your library or bookstore or bedroom. In this overview of the creative & publishing process, I’ll use one of my books (you get to choose which!) to explain how the smallest seed of an idea can become a complete book.

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Blasting Through Writer’s Block

All writers get stuck at some point, but successful writers learn how to get unstuck and finish their stories. In this talk, we’ll discuss what writer’s block is (and what it isn’t), ways to get past it, and how to cross the finish line.

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Seeing the World Through Your Character’s Eyes

Setting and description are more than just lists of adjectives. The details your character perceives tell us as much about them as their surroundings. We’ll look descriptive passages from our own writing to reveal what our characters sense, think, and feel.

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Friends, Enemies, and Everyone Between

Developing and Using Secondary Characters. Most good stories require a memorable protagonist, but our favorite stories also depend on great sidekicks and villains and minor characters. In this session we’ll use examples from Avatar: The Last Airbender, Harry Potter, and the Star Wars saga to examine how these characters function and how they bring our worlds and stories to life.

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Middle Grade: Beyond the Basics

Before you try your hand at middle-grade novels, learn some essentials to writing a good one. There’s more to it than age-appropriate vocabulary and avoiding certain topics. But what? Come and find out as we discuss approaches and to writing middle-grade characters stories, as well as some of the peculiarities of the category.

Greg’s News and Blog

Upcoming Events

Honors, Awards & Recognition

Kids Indie Next List, 2019 and 2021
Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction (finalist)
New York Public Library Best Books for Kids
Sunshine State Young Readers Award (finalist (Florida)
Nutmeg Book Award (finalist) (CT)
Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine Best Kids Books

Media Kit

By clicking the link below you will be directed to a Google Docs Folder
where you can download author photos and cover images.

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