Mr. Splitfoot (Hunt)

Author Bio
• Birth—1971
• Where—Pound Ridge, New York, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Warren Wilson College
• Awards—Bard Fiction Prize; National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award
• Currently—lives in upstate New York


Samantha Hunt is an American novelist, essayist and short-story writer. Her father was an editor, and her mother a painter. The youngest of six siblings, she grew up in a house built in 1765—haunted not in the traditional sense, but so stuffed with books, good and bad, that it "haunted" Hunt all the same.

She moved first to Vermont in 1989 where she studied literature, printmaking, and geology. A later move took her to North Carolina where she earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College. In 1999 she headed to New York City to work on her writing, supporting herself with a odd jobs, including a stint in an envelope factory.

Writing
Hunt's novels include The Seas (2004), The Invention of Everything Else (2008), and Mr. Splitfoot (2016). She won the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award and was a finalist for the Orange Prize.

Hunt's short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, McSweeney's, A Public Space, Cabinet, Esquire, Believer, Blind Spot, Harper’s Bazaar, Village Voice, Seed Magazine, Tin House, New York Magazine, on the radio program This American Life and in a number of anthologies including Trampoline edited by Kelly Link. Hunt’s play, The Difference Engine, a story about the life of Charles Babbage, was produced by the Theater of a Two-Headed Calf. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/9/2016).)