Say hello to Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours. You may remember that novel from 1998 — it won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner prize the next year.
Or you may remember the 2002 movie The Hours, starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman. The film was Oscar-nominated, and Kidman won the Oscar as best actress for her performance as Virginia Woolf.
So that’s a pretty good set of credentials right there. Mr. Cunningham is also a lecturer at Yale and a lively interview:
He tells students in his writing class not to bother if they’re going to spend time fretting over what their grandmother/mother/boyfriend will think. “A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if he’s any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world.”
For more, see our new biography of Michael Cunningham »