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 minor elective courses. 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.

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.

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 in Northern Minnesota, through New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico. 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.