Siri Hustvedt facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Siri Hustvedt
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Hustvedt in 2014
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| Born | February 19, 1955 Northfield, Minnesota, U.S. |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Education | St. Olaf College (BA) Columbia University (PhD) |
| Genre | Novels, poetry, short stories |
| Years active | 1983–present |
| Spouse | |
| Children | Sophie Auster |
| Parents | Lloyd Hustvedt Ester Vegan |
Siri Hustvedt, born on February 19, 1955, is an American writer. She writes novels and essays. Siri Hustvedt has written poetry, many novels, and several non-fiction books.
Her popular books include What I Loved (2003) and The Summer Without Men (2011). These books became international bestsellers. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages, reaching readers worldwide.
Contents
Growing Up: Early Life and Education
Siri Hustvedt grew up in Northfield, Minnesota. Her father, Lloyd Hustvedt, was an American professor. Her mother was from Norway. Siri learned to speak both English and Norwegian at home.
She went to public school in Northfield. In 1973, she graduated from the Cathedral School in Bergen, Norway.
Siri started writing when she was 13 years old. This happened after a family trip to Reykjavík. There, she read many classic books. She especially loved David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. After finishing it, she decided she wanted to be a writer.
In 1977, Siri graduated from St. Olaf College. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history. In 1978, she moved to New York City. She became a graduate student at Columbia University. Her first published work was a poem in The Paris Review.
Becoming a Writer: Her Career
Siri Hustvedt's first collection of poems, Reading to You, was published in 1982.
She earned her PhD in English from Columbia University in 1986. Her PhD paper was about Charles Dickens. It explored how language and identity work in Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend.
After finishing her studies, Hustvedt began writing prose. Parts of her first novel, The Blindfold, were published in literary magazines. These stories were even included in Best American Short Stories in 1990 and 1991.
Since then, she has continued to write fiction. She also publishes essays that connect philosophy, psychology, and brain science. She often writes about visual art too. Hustvedt has given talks at famous places like the Prado museum in Madrid. She also spoke at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She has published a book of essays about painting called Mysteries of the Rectangle.
Exploring Ideas: Themes in Her Work
Siri Hustvedt is a deep thinker. She explores big questions about who we are and how we understand the world. She often talks at universities in Europe. She helps connect different fields of study, like science and literature. For example, she gave a speech about how the life sciences relate to literature.
Hustvedt has written articles for academic journals. These include Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Clinical Neurophysiology. Her book of essays, Living, Thinking, Looking, shows how widely she thinks across different subjects.
Her books ask questions about identity and how we see things. In The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, she writes about her own health condition. She explains that she needed to look at her symptoms from "all angles." This means she explores many different viewpoints.
Hustvedt's characters often go through difficult events. These events can make them feel confused or lose their sense of self. Her work shows that our minds, bodies, and surroundings are all connected. She also looks at how gender roles affect people. Both her fiction and non-fiction explore how we look at art and what is right or wrong in art.
Awards and Special Honors
Many of Siri Hustvedt's works have received awards and recognition. A part of her novel The Blindfold was made into a movie. The film, La Chambre des Magiciennes, won an award at the Berlin Film Festival.
Her novel What I Loved was considered for several awards. It was shortlisted for the Prix Femina Étranger in France. It also won the Prix des libraires du Quebec in Canada for best book of 2003. The Summer Without Men was also shortlisted for The Femina Prize in 2011.
The Blazing World was considered for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. It won the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.
In 2015, Hustvedt became a lecturer in psychiatry at Cornell University. She received the Gabarron International Award for Thought and Humanities in 2012. She has also received honorary doctorates from several universities. These include the University of Oslo (2014), Université Stendhal-Grenoble in France (2015), and Gutenberg University-Mainz in Germany (2016). In 2019, she won the Princess of Asturias Award in Literature.
In 2024, Siri Hustvedt received the Openbank Literature Award by Vanity Fair for her writing career.
Family Life
Siri Hustvedt met her husband, writer Paul Auster, in 1981. They married the next year. They lived together in Brooklyn, New York, until his death in 2024. Their daughter, Sophie Auster, born in 1987, is a singer, songwriter, and actress.
Books by Siri Hustvedt
Poetry
- Reading to You (1982)
Fiction
- The Blindfold (1992)
- The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996)
- What I Loved (2003)
- The Sorrows of an American (2008)
- The Summer Without Men (2011)
- The Blazing World (2014)
- Memories of the Future (2019)
Nonfiction
- Yonder (1998)
- Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (2005)
- A Plea for Eros (2005)
- The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2009)
- Living, Thinking, Looking (2012)
- A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women – Essays (2016)
- Mothers, Fathers, and Others - Essays (2021)
Translations by Siri Hustvedt
- Kjetsaa, Geir. Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer's Life, translated by Siri Hustvedt and David McDuff (1998)
- Six poems by Tor Ulven from Vanishing Point. Writ, no. 18, 1986.
Translation Editor
- Fragments for a History of the Human Body, edited by Ferber, Nadof, Tazi (1998)
Original Foreign Book Publications
- Embodied Visions: What Does it Mean to Look at a Work of Art?, bilingual edition English-German (2010)
- The Eight Voyages of Sinbad, published in Spanish Ocho Viajes Con Simbad with photographs by Reza (2011)
See also
In Spanish: Siri Hustvedt para niños
