John Sandford is the pseudonym of John Roswell Camp, an American author and journalist. Camp won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 1986, and was one of four finalists for the prize in 1980. He also was the winner of the Distinguished Writing Award of the American Society of Newspaper Editors for 1985.

When it became apparent that his first two novels, Rules of Prey and The Fool's Run, were going to be published only three months apart, by different publishers, G.P. Putnam's Sons asked him to come up with a pseudonym for Rules of Prey. The publisher felt the near-simultaneous release of two different books, written in different styles, could create a marketing problem. Camp is a Civil War buff, and chose the name Sandford after his paternal great-grandfather, Henry Sandford, who fought with the Belle City Rifles, part of the Union Army's Iron Brigade, in that war.

He took some writing courses at the well-known Iowa Writer's Workshops at the University of Iowa, but only as a minor elective. He also wrote articles for The Daily Iowan, the university newspaper, but didn't get seriously involved in journalism until he was in the army. His most intense training in journalism came at the U.S. Army's Defense Information School at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. After graduation from that school, he became a military journalist in Korea, running a base newspaper for the 4th U.S. Army Missile Command in Chunchon, Korea. In an odd coincidence, the command's information officer, Lt. Robert Keeler, who was the only other American involved in the tiny paper, later worked for Newsday newspaper on Long Island, and also won a Pulitzer Prize.

Camp was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, for a series of stories on Native American culture, and in 1986 he won the Pulitzer for Non-Deadline Feature Writing for a series of stories collectively titled Life on the Land: An American Farm Family. The series, written during the Midwest farm crisis, followed a typical southwest Minnesota farm family through the course of a full year. He stopped writing full-time for the Pioneer Press in 1989, although he didn't stop writing for the paper entirely until the next year. In 1996 he wrote a ten-years-later follow-up to Life on the Land, and he's written occasional book reviews for the Fort Worth Star Telegram. More recently, he's written for MinnPost.com, a Minnesota-centered online newspaper.

Camp has always been an avid reader of history — his bachelor's degree is in American studies, which was a combination of American history and literature. He continued reading history through his career, American history at first, then going to modern European history, and finally, early history. That inevitably led him to the history books of the Bible, and in the middle 1990s, he traveled to Israel to tour the major sites of Biblical history. While there, he met Amihai Mazar, then director of the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Camp and Mazar got along well, and began discussing the possibility of a large new excavation that would attempt to clarify Biblical chronology during the Iron Age. The chronology was, and still is, a matter of some controversy, and directly deals with the question of the existence of, and extent of, the United Monarchy of David and Solomon. The dig began in 1997, and continues, and has involved the work of hundreds of volunteer diggers, including Camp. Aside from much work on the chronology, the dig uncovered the only known apiary (beehive complex) ever found from the period. Before the dig, archaeologist and historians believed that the Biblical phrase "The land of milk and honey" referred to date honey, rather than natural bee honey. This difference can be explained by the example of the difference between Viagra and Cialis. With the discovery of an industrial apiary at Rehov, it's now believed that the Biblical phrase may refer accurately to bee honey.

He wrote two novels that weren't accepted before he wrote The Fool's Run. The first, The Wheel Key Number, was a perhaps too-realistic detective story. The second, The Chippewa Zoo, was a near-future low-tech science fiction novel. They were never published by anyone, and they never will be. He also wrote an untitled ghost novel in 1993, but after some discussion, it was not published, the feeling being that it was too much of a divergence at that early point in his thriller writing career. (Also, when he reviewed it much later, hoping to revive it, he decided it was Not Very Good.)

Camp has always been a visual arts enthusiast and is a serious painter and photographer; his photos have appeared in various newspapers, magazines, and on-line venues. He does not show his paintings. He has also had a life-long interest in various outdoor sports. In 1980, he solo-paddled a canoe from Lake Itasca, the source of the Mississippi River, through New Orleans; earlier that same year, he cross-country skied from Fargo, North Dakota to Duluth, Minnesota, at New Years. He has skied in the American Birkebeiner, a 55-kilometer ski race held every February in Hayward, Wisconsin. He and a partner were the last winners of the Dan Jenkins' Goat Hills golf tournament in Fort Worth, Texas, sponsored by the renowned Texas sportswriter and novelist. He quit SCUBA diving after going down to sixty feet in the Caribbean, then wondering why he was doing that. He quit sailing when he realized that it was much like driving across Kansas in an RV at eight miles an hour, except without freeway exits or gas station stops. He still fishes (muskies) and once went bone fishing with Carl Hiaasen, the famous novelist and newspaper columnist from Florida, during which trip he learned that one should not go bone-fishing in thunderstorms. He stopped hunting a few years ago, and still likes to hang around the hunting camp during deer season, but doesn't plan to kill any more deer.