It’s the birthday of Suzanne Collins (b. 1962), author of the hugely popular YA series The Hunger Games (2008-2010).

Collins was born in Hartford, Connecticut, but her family moved frequently because her father was with the Air Force. She graduated from high school in Birmingham, Alabama. In her teen years, Collins was mostly interested in acting and studied theater and telecommunications at Indiana University (1985). She was about 20 when she became interested in writing plays as well as acting in them, and pursued an M.F.A. in dramatic writing from New York University (1989).

Among the TV shows Collins wrote for in the 1990s was the children’s show, Clifford’s Puppy Days. (Clearly it’s a short step from Clifford the Big Red Dog to the dark dystopian world of The Hunger Games.) She also worked on other children’s shows containing characters with names like “Shelby Woo” and “Wubbzy,” so let’s move quickly on to her literary career.

While still working in television, Collins began writing what became the Underland Chronicles (2004-2007), a children’s series about a subterranean world filled with both humans and giant talking rats and cockroaches. Her next series was The Hunger Games, and in an interview with Scholastic, Collins explains that part of her inspiration for the series came from the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, in which Athenian youth were being sacrificed to the Minotaur; Collins had been fascinated by this myth in her youth. But the actual concept for The Hunger Games came one night when Collins was channel-surfing and went from a reality show in which young people were competing for a prize to actual footage of the Iraq war.

Collins is one of the bestselling YA authors of all times and has a terrible sense of direction.

Have a lovely Friday (it’s Friday!) and stay scrupulously honest to the data.