Carl Hiaasen

“In the summer of 2005, I returned to golf after a much needed layoff of thirty-two years.”

Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida, still lives there, and sets his fiction there. He graduated from the University of Florida, and in 1976, at 23, joined the Miami Herald as a general assignment reporter and part of its investigative team. (He had a penchant for rooting out crooked development deals that threatened nature, a theme that recurs in several of his novels.) He still works for the paper, where he’s been writing a regular column since 1985.

The London Observer has called him “America's finest satirical novelist.” As one fan wrote: “Hiaasen's Florida is a hive of greedy businessmen, corrupt politicians, dumb blondes, apathetic retirees, intellectually challenged tourists, hard-luck redneck cooters, and militant ecoteurs.”

In recent years, Hiaasen has written two novels for younger readers, Hoot and Flush. A third is on the way. Initially motivated to write for a different audience so that the young people in his own family had something appropriate of his to read, Hiaasen was then inspired by the feedback he got from children and by his experiences speaking at schools.

See what others are saying:

Fore! A Writer Tees Off and a Turtle Is Airborne
by Janet Maslin The New York TImes, May 19, 2008.