Samantha Hunt


Samantha Hunt is an American novelist, essayist and short-story writer.
She is the author of The Dark Dark, published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux; The Seas, published by MacAdam/Cage; and the novels Mr. Splitfoot and The Invention of Everything Else, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Early life

Hunt was born the youngest of six children in 1971 in Pound Ridge, New York. Her father was an editor, her mother was a painter. She moved in 1989 for to attend the University of Vermont, where she studied literature, printmaking and geology. She received her MFA from Warren Wilson College, before moving to New York City in 1999.

Career

Books

Hunt's debut novel, The Seas, first published in 2004, is a magical realism novel about a young girl in a Northern town who believes herself to be a mermaid. The book was voted one of Village Voice Literary Supplement's Favorite Books of 2004, and won the National Book Foundation award for "5 under 35" in 2006. In 2018, The Seas was republished by Tin House Books in 2018 with a foreword by Maggie Nelson.
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.
Her other novels include , a ghost story, and , 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 .

Awards

Hunt won the , the and was a finalist for the Orange Prize. In 2017, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction

Literary Influences

Hunt's credits her experience as being one of six children for her interest in literature, her dialogue writing, and how she writes about motherhood in her novels. She cites Joseph T. Shipley’s Dictionary of Word Origins as making her who she is today.

Profession

Hunt is a professor of writing at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.

Personal life

Hunt and her husband live in Trivoli, New York with their three daughters.
In 2015, Hunt revealed that she had undergone treatment for ovarian cancer.

Books

• The Dark Dark: Stories

• Mr Splitfoot

• The Invention of Everything Else

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• My Inventions and Other Writings by Nikola Tesla and Samantha Hunt

Online Texts

Fiction

• ' - a short story

• ' - a short story

• ' - a short story

• ' - a short story

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Essays

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