Samantha Hunt

Samantha Hunt was born in 1971 in Pound Ridge, New York, the youngest of six siblings. She was raised in a house built in 1765 which wasn't haunted in the traditional sense but was so overstuffed with books— good and bad ones— that it had the effect of haunting Hunt all the same. Her mother is a painter and her father was an editor. In 1989 Hunt moved to Vermont where she studied literature, printmaking, and geology. She got her MFA from Warren Wilson College and then, in 1999, moved to New York City. While working on her writing, she held a number of odd jobs including a stint in an envelope factory.

Her first novel, The Seas, was published in 2004 by MacAdam/Cage and again in 2005 by Picador. It won the National Book Foundation's award for writers under 35. It was also voted one of the Top 27 Books of 2004 by the Voice Literary Supplement. The Seas imagines the life of a young woman growing up in the far, far north. Despite all the evidence to the contrary— namely, she has legs— the narrator believes she is a mermaid.

Like The Seas, Hunt's second book points out mysteries rather than solving them. The Invention of Everything Else, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008, is a novel about the very real, though forgotten inventor Nikola Tesla. Hunt spent three years researching Tesla, a man who lived most of his life in New York City hotel rooms; thought himself wed to a pigeon; was friends with Mark Twain; invented radio, AC electricity, and a motor powered by June bugs (when he was eight years old). He imagined photographing thought and constructing a stationary ring above the equator so that by simply staying put, a person could travel around the world in twenty-four hours. In the course of her research, Hunt met many Tesla fanatics and fans. She also got to take a bath in Tesla's tub at the Hotel New Yorker.

Hunt's short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Esquire, A Public Space, Cabinet, Tin House, Seed Magazine, New York Magazine, Blind Spot, Harper's Bazaar, The Believer, and on the radio program, This American Life. Her play, "The Difference Engine," a story about the life of Charles Babbage, was produced by the Theater of the Two-Headed Calf. Her work has been translated into seven languages. Hunt teaches writing at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Bibliography:

The Invention of Everything Else (2008)

The Seas (2004)

Links:

Samantha Hunt's website
Interview with Writers Revealed
New York Times Book Review