Michael Cunningham

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Michael Cunningham (born November 6, 1952) is an award-winning American writer/novelist, best known for his 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Hours.

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[edit] Life and career

Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, OH, and grew up in La Canada Flintridge, California, in Los Angeles County. He studied English literature at Stanford University where he earned his degree. Later at the University of Iowa he received a Michener Fellowship and was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. While studying at Iowa, he had short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly and the Paris Review.

In 1993 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1998 a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 1995 he was awarded the Whiting Writers' Award. Cunningham teaches at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and at Brooklyn College.

Although Cunningham is gay and has been partnered for 18 years, he dislikes being referred to as only a "gay writer", according to a PlanetOut article [1] because while being gay does greatly influence his work, he feels that it is not (and should not be) his defining characteristic.

In May of 2006, The Washington Post questioned over 125 authors, publishers, editiors, and people in the publishing industry to select one novel as the best piece of fiction published in the last 25 years. By a winning plurality of 15 votes, Toni Morrison's "Beloved" won finishing ahead of Don DeLillo's Underworld (11 votes), Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (8) and John Updike's Rabbit series (8). Cunningham selected Don Delillo's White Noise as his choice. The results appeared in the New York Times Book Review on May 21, 2006.[2] [3]