Nancy Farmer

Biography

Nancy Farmer (born 1941) spent years living in Africa — Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and South Africa — where she worked as an entomologist and witnessed political systems built on labor exploitation, racial hierarchy, and border enforcement. She later lived along the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona, where immigration politics and the drug trade were daily realities. These experiences inform every element of Opium's world-building: the eejit labor system draws from African colonial labor practices, the border politics draw from her Arizona observations, and the Keepers draw from her knowledge of revolutionary movements that promised equality and delivered oppression.

Nancy Farmer at a glance