Role Author Name Michael Cunningham | Signature | |
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Notable awards Pulitzer Prize for FictionPEN/Faulkner Award Movies The Hours, A Home at the End of the World, Evening, The Destruction Artist Books The Hours, By Nightfall, The Snow Queen, A Home at the End of the World, Specimen Days Similar People Profiles | ||
Michael cunningham 2011 national book festival
Michael Cunningham (born November 6, 1952) is a U.S. novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is a senior lecturer of creative writing at Yale University.
Contents
- Michael cunningham 2011 national book festival
- Conversations michael cunningham
- Early life and education
- Career
- Personal life
- Awards and achievements
- References
Conversations michael cunningham
Early life and education
Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Pasadena, California. He studied English literature at Stanford University, where he earned his degree. Later, at the University of Iowa, he received a Michener Fellowship and was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. While studying at Iowa, he had short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly and the Paris Review. His short story "White Angel" was later used as a chapter in his novel A Home at the End of the World. It was included in "The Best American Short Stories, 1989", published by Houghton Mifflin.
In 1993, Cunningham received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1988 a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 1995 he was awarded a Whiting Award. Cunningham has taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and in the creative writing M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College. He is a senior lecturer of creative writing at Yale University.
Career
The Hours established Cunningham as a major force in U.S. writing, and his 2010 novel, By Nightfall, was also well received by U.S. critics. Cunningham edited a book of poetry and prose by Walt Whitman, Laws for Creations, and co-wrote, with Susan Minot, a screenplay adapted from Minot's novel Evening. He was a producer for the 2007 film Evening, starring Glenn Close, Toni Collette, and Meryl Streep.
In November 2010, Cunningham judged one of NPR's "Three Minute Fiction" contests.
Personal life
Although Cunningham is gay and was in a long-term domestic partnership with psychoanalyst Ken Corbett, he dislikes being referred to as a gay writer, according to a PlanetOut article. While he often writes about gay people, he does not "want the gay aspects of [his] books to be perceived as their single, primary characteristic."
Awards and achievements
For The Hours, Cunningham was awarded the:
In 1995, Cunningham received the a Whiting Award.
In 2011 Cunningham won The Fernanda Pivano Award for American Literature in Italy.