Laird Hunt

Laird Hunt (born April 3, 1968) is a Singapore-born American writer, translator, and academic.
Early life and education
Laird Hunt was born on April 3, 1968, in Singapore. His father was an American banker who moved along with his family in various places such as Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere. After his parents divorced, Hunt was sent to live with his grandmother in Indiana, where he went to the 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 studied French literature at the Sorbonne.
Academia
He was for a time a professor in the Creative Writing program at University of Denver. He currently teaches in Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.
Writing
Hunt is the author of eight novels and a collection of short work, including the 2021 National Book Award finalist Zorrie. He has translated several novels from the French, including Oliver Rohe's Vacant Lot (2010) and Stuart Merrill's Paul Verlaine (2010).
His works is said to 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.
While working on his first novel, Hunt worked in the press office at the United Nations.
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. His fiction and translations have appeared in literary journals such as Conjunctions, McSweeney's, Bomb, Ploughshares, Bookforum, The Believer, Fence, and Zoetrope. For a time, Hunt was editor in the Denver Quarterly.
Film adaptations
In 2014, it was announced by Element Pictures that Irish director Lenny Abrahamson would film an adaptation of Hunt's Civil War novel Neverhome, but the project did not materialize.
Personal life
Hunt lives in Providence, Rhode Island with his wife Eleni Sikelianos, a poet and the grand-grand-daughter of Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos, and their daughter Eva.
Awards and honors
2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for fiction for Kind One
2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction finalist for Kind One
2015 Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine for Neverhome
2021 National Book Award for Fiction finalist for Zorrie
Works
Dear Home. Small Press Distribution. 1999.
Contributed to The &NOW Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing. &NOW Books, Lake Forest College Press. 2013.
The Evening Road. New York: Little Brown and Company. 2017.
In the House in the Dark of the Woods. Little, Brown and Company. 2018.
Zorrie, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2021. National Book Award Finalist
This Wide Terraqueous World, Coffee House Press, 2023.
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
Living people
1968 births
Writers from Boulder, Colorado
Indiana University alumni
American male novelists
21st-century American novelists
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction winners
21st-century American male writers
Brown University faculty