Laird Hunt


Laird Hunt 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. 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.

Writing career

Hunt is the author of seven novels and a collection of short work. His works intersect several genres, including experimental literature, exploratory fiction, literary noir, speculative fiction and difficult fiction 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. Hunt has also translated several novels from the French including Oliver Rohe's Vacant Lot, Stuart Merrill's Paul Verlaine. He has contributed to many literary publications, including McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Bomb, Bookforum, The Believer, Fence, and Conjunctions and is currently editor of the Denver Quarterly.

Awards and honors

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

Works