American · b. 1968
Laird Hunt writes novels that feel like recovered documents from parallel Americas. "Zorrie" (2021), a finalist for the National Book Award, compresses a rural Indiana woman's entire life into 160 pages of luminous prose. The American author spent years in Europe before returning to teach in Colorado, and his work carries both the American vernacular and something stranger—a sense of history as haunting rather than settled. His sentences move slowly, accumulating weight, and his characters inhabit landscapes that seem both familiar and subtly wrong.