Samantha Hunt
“I’m writing to discover more unknowns rather than to solve any unknowns. Probably that habit of asking questions comes out of that. As I write more, I only have more questions.”
Samantha Hunt
(c) Tim Davis
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“Eerie, profound, and daring, this is a book only the inimitable Hunt could write.”
“An ardent investigation into life, love, death, and creativity . . . Rendered in exceptionally honed, often ravishing prose spiked with hilarious or stunning candor . . . A literary performance of uncommon perception, vitality, daring, and heart.”
“The Dark Dark . . . wields such a subtle and alien power that I couldn’t read more than a couple of pieces in a sitting without feeling like some witchy substance was working its way through my blood . . . Wonderfully spooky.”
“Beguiling . . . daring . . . Hunt at her best is a lot like the uncle of one character, who is described as ‘so good at imagining things’ that ‘he makes the imagined things real.’ Hunt’s dreamlike images operate in service to earthbound ideas . . . [She] gets at the myriad ways women work to keep their self-possession in the face of social and interpersonal expectations.”
““Samantha Hunt’s third novel, Mr. Splitfoot, will haunt me...I’ve dog-eared so many pages in honor of vivid prose that my advance reader’s copy of Mr. Splitfoot curls up with fattened corners...the novel moves not just in two time frames, told through two voices, a first-person narrator and a third-, but also…it moves in the fourth dimension, stamping itself upon the reading mind. Hypnotic and glowing, Mr. Splitfoot insists on its own ghostly presence.”
“Hunt’s magical new novel is a love letter to one of the world’s most remarkable inventors…For a moment…everything seems possible.”
“To describe Samantha Hunt’s entrancing first novel, The Seas, is to try to interpret a watery dream that pushes the boundaries between fiction and fantasy. . . . Hunt’s nimbleness makes the idea of leaning toward mermaid fantasies enticing.”
Samantha Hunt is the author of five books, most recently The Unwritten Book: An Investigation (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Maggie Nelson praised as “a beautiful, inventive collection shot through with wildness and grace.” Hunt's other books are The Dark Dark (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017), a collection of short fictions named a Best Book of the Year by NPR,Vogue, Kirkus Reviews, and Huffington Post, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Shirley Jackson Award; Mr Splitfoot (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), called “hypnotic and glowing” by the New York Times; The Invention of Everything Else (Mariner Books, 2009), winner of the Bard Fiction Prize; and The Seas (Picador, 2005), which Andrea Barrett called, “strange in the best possible way.”
Hunt is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Prize, the St. Francis College Literary Prize. She was a finalist for the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Hunt was asked how her work complicates ideas of being a woman, a wife and a mother. “The part of sexism that bores and angers me most is the culling, the simplification of women into Hallmark cards of femininity. When I became a mom, no one ever said, “Hey, you made a death. You made your children’s deaths.” Meanwhile, I could think of little else. It’s scary to think of mothers as makers of death, but it sure gives them more power and complexity than one usually finds.”
Hunt holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, She is mother to three and sister to five.She is gardener, a beekeeper, a wild swimmer, a singer, a walker and a forest enthusiast in Tivoli, New York.
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