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.)
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.