Author
Michael Cunningham
Birth Date
November 6, 1952
(73 Years)
Associated Country
United States
Michael Cunningham is an American novelist and screenwriter known for his lyrical prose and exploration of identity, time, and human connection. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and later studied at Stanford University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
Cunningham is best known for his novel The Hours (1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. The novel interweaves the lives of three women across different time periods, including one inspired by Virginia Woolf, and was later adapted into an acclaimed film. His other works include A Home at the End of the World and Specimen Days, which also explore themes of love, loss, and the passage of time.
In addition to fiction, Cunningham has written essays and worked in film and television. He is praised for his elegant style and emotional depth, and he is considered an important voice in contemporary American literature.
Cunningham is best known for his novel The Hours (1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. The novel interweaves the lives of three women across different time periods, including one inspired by Virginia Woolf, and was later adapted into an acclaimed film. His other works include A Home at the End of the World and Specimen Days, which also explore themes of love, loss, and the passage of time.
In addition to fiction, Cunningham has written essays and worked in film and television. He is praised for his elegant style and emotional depth, and he is considered an important voice in contemporary American literature.
Books
Unsayable 2026
Go ahead. Try using language to slit the skin of mortality to see what’s on the other side.
At the age of three, Michael Cunningham began obsessively collecting the names of things: oak, Chevrolet,...
Day 2024
April 5, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, husband and wife, are slowly drifting apart—and both, it seems, are a little bit in...
Based on the ingenious Sir Michael Twitter account, How to (Almost) Make Friends on the Internet is the funniest book you'll read this year.
Whether it's offering his services as a Karate Lawyer or...
A Wild Swan 2016
A poisoned apple and a monkey's paw with the power to change fate; a girl whose extraordinarily long hair causes catastrophe; a man with one human arm and one swan's wing; and a house constructed of...
The Snow Queen 2015
Michael Cunningham's luminous novel begins with a vision, in November of 2004. Barrett Meeks, having lost love yet again, is walking through Central Park. He turns his gaze toward the sky, where he...
By Nightfall 2011
Peter and Rebecca Harris: mid-forties, denizens of Manhattan's SoHo, nearing the apogee of committee careers in the arts—he a dealer, she an editor. With a spacious loft, a college-age daughter in...
The Hours 2000
The Hours is the story of three women: Clarissa Vaughan, a beloved friend of an ailing poet, who one fine New York morning goes about planning a party in his honor; Laura Brown, who in a 1950s Los...
Michael Cunningham's novel is the story of two boyhood friends: Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. In New York after college, Bobby moves...