Michael Cunningham Contemporary American writer Date of Birth: 06.11.1952 Country: USA

Biography of Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham is a contemporary American writer and the recipient of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. He was born on November 6, 1952, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and spent his childhood in Pasadena, California. In 1975, Cunningham earned a bachelor's degree in English literature from Stanford University, and five years later, he completed his master's degree at the University of Iowa.

Cunningham began publishing his work in the late 1970s, with his stories appearing in renowned American literary magazines such as The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Paris Review. In 1989, his novella "White Angel," which later became a chapter in his novel "A Home At the End Of the World," was included in the annual collection of the best American short stories. In 1990, Cunningham published his first notable novel, "Golden States," which he considers a failure and has not been reissued. His second novel, "Flesh and Blood" (1995), a family saga exploring topics such as immigration, self-discovery, alternative culture, homosexuality, AIDS, and death, has yet to be translated into Russian.

Cunningham's third and most famous novel, "The Hours," was published in 1998. It tells the story of three women whose lives are intricately linked to Virginia Woolf's book "Mrs. Dalloway": the renowned English writer Virginia Woolf, a 1950s housewife named Laura Brown from Los Angeles, and a contemporary lesbian New Yorker named Clarissa Vaughan. "The Hours" earned Cunningham the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and was successfully adapted into a film by British director Stephen Daldry in 2002, starring Nicole Kidman (who won an Oscar for her performance), Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep. Cunningham himself made a cameo appearance as a passerby near the flower shop where Streep's character buys a bouquet.

In 2005, the Russian translation of Cunningham's fourth novel, "Specimen Days," was released. The book consists of three different genres, all set in New York City and featuring a set of characters (a man, a woman, and a boy) and the figure of American poet Walt Whitman. The first part is a mystical story set during the industrial revolution, the second is a thriller set in post-9/11 New York, and the final novella takes place in a post-apocalyptic future.

Currently, Michael Cunningham resides in New York City. Throughout his career, he has received several notable awards, including the 1982 National Society of Iowa Writers' Award, the 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for "The Hours."