Laird Hunt (born April 3, 1968) is an American writer, translator and academic.

Life

Hunt grew up in Singapore, San Francisco, The Hague, and London before moving to his grandmother's farm in rural Indiana, where he attended Clinton Central High School.[1] He earned a B.A. from Indiana University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He also studied French literature at the Sorbonne. Hunt worked in the press office at the United Nations while writing his first novel. He was a professor in the Creative Writing program at University of Denver. Hunt lives with his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, in Providence, Rhode Island, and works as a professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.[2][3]

Writing career

Hunt is the author of eight novels and a collection of short work, including the 2021 National Book Award finalist Zorrie. Hunt has also translated several novels from the French including Oliver Rohe's Vacant Lot (2010), Stuart Merrill's Paul Verlaine (2010). His works intersect several genres, including experimental literature, exploratory fiction, literary noir, speculative fiction and difficult fiction[4][5] and include elements ranging from the bizarre, the tragic, and the comic. His influences include Georges Perec, W. G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and the French Modernists.[6][7]

Hunt's reviews and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Los Angeles Times, and his fiction and translations have appeared in many literary journals, including Conjunctions, McSweeney's, Bomb, Ploughshares, Bookforum, The Believer, Fence, and Zoetrope, is the former editor of the Denver Quarterly.

A former United Nations press officer who was raised in rural Indiana, he now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he teaches in Brown University’s Literary Arts Program and spends his days with his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, their daughter, Eva, and two cats.

Awards and honors

• 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for fiction for Kind One[8]
• 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction finalist for Kind One[9]
• 2015 Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine for Neverhome[10]
• 2021 National Book Award for Fiction finalist for Zorrie[11]

Film adaptations

In 2014, it was announced that Irish director Lenny Abrahamson would film an adaptation of Hunt's Civil War novel Neverhome.[12]

Works

• Dear Home. Small Press Distribution. 1999. ISBN 9781893032200
• The Paris Stories. Smokeproof Press; Marick Press. 2010 [2000].ISBN 9780965887786
• The Impossibly. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. 2012 [2001]. ISBN 9781566891172
• Indiana, Indiana. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. 2003. ISBN 9781566891448
• The Exquisite. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. 2006.ISBN 9781566891875
• Ray of the Star. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. 2009. ISBN 9781566892322
• Kind One. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. 2012. ISBN 9781566893114
• Neverhome. New York: Little Brown and Company. 2014.ISBN 9780316370134
• Contributed to The &NOW Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing. &NOW Books, Lake Forest College Press. 2013. ISBN 9780982315644[13]
• The Evening Road. New York: Little Brown and Company. 2017.[14] ISBN 9780316391283
• In the House in the Dark of the Woods. Little, Brown and Company. 2018.[15] ISBN 9780316411059
• Zorrie, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2021. ISBN 978-1-6355753-6-1. National Book Award Finalist
• This Wide Terraqueous World, Coffee House Press, 2023. ISBN 978-1-56689-667-2

References

External links

• Laird Hunt's office website
• Laird Hunt at Coffee House Press
• Laird Hunt at Bloomsbury
• Laird Hunt at Little, Brown

Interviews

• Weekend Edition, November 13, 2021
• Transatlantica, December 2021
• Harvard Bookstore, February 2021
• The Millions, March 17, 2017
• Issuu, February 11, 2016
• Bookforum, January 18, 2013
• Hobart (Part One), January 1, 2010
• Hobart (Part Two), February 1, 2010