Samantha Hunt | |
---|---|
Born | May 15, 1971 |
Occupation | Novelist |
Language | English |
Nationality | American |
Education | Warren Wilson College ( MFA) |
Notable works | The Seas , The Dark Dark,Mr. Splitfoot,The Invention of Everything Else, The Unwritten Book |
Notable awards | St. Francis College Literary Prize |
Website | |
www |
Samantha Hunt (born May 15, 1971) is an American novelist, essayist and short-story writer.
She is the author of The Dark Dark and The Unwritten Book, published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux; The Seas, published by MacAdam/Cage and Tin House; [1] and the novels Mr. Splitfoot and The Invention of Everything Else, [2] published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Hunt was born the youngest of six children [3] in 1971. Her father was an editor, her mother is a painter. [4] She moved in 1989 to attend the University of Vermont, [5] where she studied literature, printmaking and geology. She received her MFA from Warren Wilson College, before moving to New York City in 1999. [4]
Hunt's debut novel, The Seas, first published in 2004, is a magical-realist novel about a young girl in a Northern town who believes herself to be a mermaid. [6] The book was voted one of the Village Voice Literary Supplement's Favorite Books of 2004, [7] and won the National Book Foundation award for "5 under 35" in 2006. [8] In 2018, The Seas was republished by Tin House Books in 2018 with a foreword by Maggie Nelson. [7]
In 2008, she published her second novel, The Invention of Everything Else through Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The novel provides a fictionalized account of the final days of inventor Nikola Tesla. It won both the Bard Fiction Prize in 2010, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. [9]
Her other novels include Mr. Splitfoot (2016), a ghost story, [10] and The Dark Dark: Stories (2017), a collection of short stories.
Hunt's short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, McSweeney's, The Atlantic, A Public Space, Cabinet, Esquire, The Believer, Blind Spot, Harper’s Bazaar, The Village Voice, Seed Magazine, Tin House, New York Magazine, on the radio program This American Life and in a number of anthologies including Trampoline edited by Kelly Link. Hunt's play, The Difference Engine, a story about the life of Charles Babbage, was produced by the Theater of a Two-Headed Calf.
Hunt won the Bard Fiction Prize, [11] the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 award, [12] the St. Francis College Literary Prize [13] and was a finalist for the Orange Prize. [14] In 2017, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. [15]
Hunt's credits her experiences growing up one of six children for her interest in literature, [16] her dialogue, [17] and her fictional portrayals of motherhood. [3]
Hunt is a professor of writing at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. [10]