Suzanne Collins

Suzanne Collins's Backstory

Early life

Suzanne Collins was born on August 10, 1962, in Hartford, Connecticut, the youngest of four children.³ Her father was a career U.S. Air Force officer, and the family moved often, living for a time in Indiana and in Belgium; she finished high school in Birmingham, Alabama.³ She has described her father as a historian and doctor of political science who taught his children history as a story, took them to battlefields and put moral dilemmas to them.² His deployment to Vietnam, when she was six, later became the subject of her picture book Year of the Jungle.¹

She studied theater and telecommunications at Indiana University, graduating in 1985, and earned an M.F.A. in dramatic writing from New York University in 1989.³

Children’s television

Collins began writing for children’s television in 1991 and worked on the staffs of several Nickelodeon shows, among them Clarissa Explains It All and The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo.¹ She wrote stories for the preschool series Little Bear and Oswald, was head writer of Clifford’s Puppy Days, and co-wrote the Rankin/Bass special Santa, Baby! with Peter Bakalian, which was nominated for a Writers Guild Award.¹ She has said she spent seventeen years in children’s television, and that she structures her novels in three acts of nine chapters each, as she learned to do for scripts.²

The Underland Chronicles

While working on the Kids’ WB show Generation O!, Collins met the author and illustrator James Proimos, who encouraged her to write children’s books.⁴ Thinking about Alice in Wonderland, she reasoned that a city child was more likely to fall down a manhole than a rabbit hole, and the idea became Gregor the Overlander, published in 2003.⁴³ Four more Underland books followed through 2007; the series became a New York Times bestseller.³¹

The Hunger Games

Collins has said the idea for The Hunger Games came while she was channel surfing between reality-television programs and footage of the Iraq War, at a time when she was thinking about how to explain just war theory to young readers.² She drew on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, which she first met in Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, and on a childhood fascination with gladiator films and the story of Spartacus.²

The Hunger Games was published in September 2008, followed by Catching Fire in 2009 and Mockingjay in 2010.⁴³ She returned to Panem with two prequels: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020) and Sunrise on the Reaping (2025).³ The Associated Press reported that Sunrise on the Reaping had the biggest first week in the series’ history.⁸

Films and stage

Collins wrote much of the screenplay for the 2012 film of The Hunger Games, and the second and third books were adapted in 2013, 2014 and 2015, with Mockingjay in two parts.³ She has been an executive producer on all of the films; the franchise has grossed more than $3.3 billion worldwide.¹ A stage adaptation by Conor McPherson opened in London in 2025.¹⁰