Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt

Hustvedt at the 2014 Brooklyn Book Festival
Born (1955-02-19) February 19, 1955
Northfield, Minnesota
Residence Brooklyn, New York
Nationality American
Education B.A. in history, Ph.D. in English
Alma mater St. Olaf College and Columbia University
Occupation Writer
Years active Since 1983
Known for Novels, poetry, short stories
Spouse(s) Paul Auster
Children Sophie Auster
Parent(s) Lloyd Hustvedt and Ester Vegan
Website www.sirihustvedt.net

Siri Hustvedt (born February 19, 1955) is an American novelist and essayist. Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, six novels, two books of essays, and several works of non-fiction. Her books include: The Blindfold (1992), The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), What I Loved (2003), for which she is best known, A Plea for Eros (2006), The Sorrows of an American (2008), The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2010), The Summer Without Men (2011), Living, Thinking, Looking (2012), and The Blazing World (2014). What I Loved and The Summer Without Men were international bestsellers. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.

Early life

Siri Hustvedt attended public school in her hometown Northfield, Minnesota and received a degree from the Cathedral School in Bergen, Norway, in 1973. Hustvedt graduated from St. Olaf College with a B.A. in History in 1977. She moved to New York City to attend Columbia University as a graduate student in 1978. Her first published work was a poem in The Paris Review.[1]

Career

A small collection of poems, Reading to You,[2] appeared in 1982 with Station Hill Press.

She completed her PhD in English at Columbia in 1986. Her dissertation on Charles Dickens, Figures of Dust: A Reading of Our Mutual Friend, is an exploration of language and identity in the novel, with particular emphasis on Dickens’ metaphors of fragmentation, his use of pronouns, and their relation to a narrative, dialogical conception of self.[3] She refers in the dissertation to sources that would influence and reappear in her later writing, including the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Emile Benveniste, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Mary Douglas, Paul Ricoeur, and Julia Kristeva.

After finishing her dissertation, Hustvedt began writing prose. Two stories of the four that would become her first novel, The Blindfold, were published in literary magazines[4] and later included in Best American Short Stories 1990 and 1991.[5] Since then she has continued to write fiction and publish essays on visual art but also on diverse interdisciplinary subjects that investigate the intersections among philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. She also writes regularly about visual art. Hustvedt gave the third annual Schelling lecture on aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

She has also given talks at the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and published a large volume of essays on painting: Mysteries of the Rectangle. In 2011, she delivered the annual Sigmund Freud lecture in Vienna, one of a distinguished list of speakers that includes Leo Bersani, Juliet Mitchell, Jessica Benjamin, Mark Solms, and Judith Butler.

Hustvedt at Heidelberg University in Heidelberg, Germany in 2011

Siri Hustvedt is a scholar and intellectual who engages with fundamental questions of contemporary ethics and epistemology. In her visits to European and German universities, she has given readings from her works and contributed to the growing interdisciplinary dialogue between the humanities and the sciences, notably in a keynote lecture and panel discussion on the relationship between the life sciences and literature at the 2012 annual conference of the German Association for American Studies in Mainz. In 2013, she delivered the opening keynote address at an international conference on Søren Kierkegaard in Copenhagen on the occasion of the philosopher’s two hundredth birthday.

She has published essays and papers in academic and scientific journals, including Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Seizure: European Journal of Epilepsy, Neuropsychoanalysis, and Clinical Neurophysiology. Her collection of essays Living, Thinking, Looking is nothing if not indicative of her broad and deep learning in several disciplines. In 2012, she received the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. The Blazing World was long-listed for the Booker Prize, and she recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo.

Siri Hustvedt's works repeatedly pose questions about the nature of identity, selfhood and perception. In The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, an interdisciplinary account of her own seizure disorder, Hustvedt states her need to view her symptom not “through a single window” but “from all angles.”[6] These multiple perspectives do not resolve themselves into a single view but rather create an atmosphere of ambiguity and flux. Hustvedt presents the reader with characters whose minds are inseparable from their bodies and their environments and whose sense of self is situated on the threshold between the conscious and unconscious. Her characters often suffer traumatic events that disrupt the rhythms of their lives and lead to disorientation and a discontinuity of their identities. Hustvedt’s concern with embodied identity manifests itself in her investigation of gender roles and interpersonal relations. Both her fiction and nonfiction highlight dynamics of the gaze and questions of ethical representation in the visual arts.

Awards and recognitions

A section of The Blindfold was made into a movie by the French filmmaker Claude Miller.[7] The film La Chambre des Magiciennes won The International Critics Prize at the Berlin Film Festival.[8] What I Loved was on the initial short list for the Prix Femina Étranger in France for best foreign book of the year. It was also short-listed for Waterstone’s Literary Fiction Award in England and the Barcelona Bookseller’s Award in Spain. It won the Prix des libraires du Quebec in Canada for best book of 2003.[9] The Summer Without Men was also shortlisted for The Femina Prize in 2011.[10]

The Blazing World was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and won the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.[11]

In 2015, Hustvedt was appointed as lecturer in psychiatry at the Dewitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Weill Medical School of Cornell University.

Siri Hustvedt is the 2012 recipient of the Gabarron International Award for Thought and Humanities. [12]

In 2014, she received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Oslo.[13] She received an Honorary Doctorate from the Université Stendhal-Grenoble, France, on October 20, 2015 and from Gutenberg University-Mainz, German, on June 16, 2016.

Personal life

Hustvedt met her husband, writer Paul Auster in 1981, and they were married the following year. They have one daughter, singer Sophie Auster.[14]

Auster used Iris, the narrator of Hustvedt's first novel, The Blindfold, in his novel Leviathan.[15]

Books

Poetry

Fiction

Nonfiction

Translation

Translation editor

Original foreign book publications

Publications in journals and anthologies

Poems

Stories

Reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 1990. Ed. Richard Ford. New York: Houghton Mifflin. 1990. 105-126. Also reprinted in The Literary Insomniac: Stories and Essays for Sleepless Nighta. Eds. Elyse Cheney and Wendy Hubbert. New York: Doubleday, 1996. 20-48.

Essays on visual art

Reprinted: The Penguin Book of Art Writing. Eds. Karen Wright and Martin Gayford, 1999. Reprinted in Writers on Artists, London: DK, 2001.

Essays on various subjects

Lectures and conversations

Criticism

Books

Selected Articles

Notes

  1. ↑ "Weather Markings", The Paris Review 81 (1981): 136-137.
  2. ↑ Reading to You (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1982).
  3. ↑ Figures of Dust: A Reading of Our Mutual Friend (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1986).
  4. ↑ “Mr. Morning,” Ontario Review 30 (1989): 80–98; “Houdini,” Fiction 9 (1990): 144–62.
  5. ↑ “Mr. Morning,” in The Best American Short Stories 1990, ed. Richard Ford (New York: Houghton Mifflin. 1990), 105–26; “Houdini,” in Best American Short Stories 1991, ed. Alice Adams (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 209–27.
  6. ↑ The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 73.
  7. ↑ Film page of the Berlin Film Festival
  8. ↑ Berlin Film Festival Awards Page
  9. ↑ Prix des libraires du Quebec page
  10. ↑ Sylvie Prioul, “Prix Femina 2011: première selection,” Le nouvel Observateur, September 16, 2011.
  11. ↑
  12. ↑ The Gabarron International Awards
  13. ↑
  14. ↑ Denes, Melissa (February 3, 2006). "The dark side of happiness". The Guardian.
  15. ↑ The Paris Review Interviews, ed. Philip Gourevitch, vol. 4 (New York: Picador, 2009), 324.
  16. ↑ Siri Hustvedt, Embodied Visions: What Does It Mean to Look at a Work of Art? / Mit dem Korper sehen: Was bedeutet es, ein Kunstwerk zu betrachten? (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2010).

References

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Interviews and lectures

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