Living, Thinking, Looking

Siri Hustvedt is the author of seven novels, five collections of essays, a poetry collection and a memoir. Her books have been listed for major prizes, including the Booker Prize, the Women's Prize and the PEN America Literary Award, and she has been awarded the LA Times Book Prize, the Prix Européen de l'Essai Charles Veillon, the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities, the Princess of Asturia Award and the Openbank Literature Award, among others. She holds a PhD from Columbia University and has been awarded honorary PhDs from Johannes Gutenberg University, Stendhal University and the University of Oslo. She is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and has written on art for the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph. Born in Minnesota, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Her erudition, the sharp clarity of her thinking, the variety of her sources and the supple ways in which she weaves them into personal narrative, coupled with her fearlessness in the face of those aspects of the human condition which are of necessity ambiguous, infuse her work with a rare kind of quiet intellectual confidence...I'll be returning to these essays.