Facts about Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham Biography
Michael Cunningham won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for his 1998 novel The Hours, a creative reimagining of Virginia Woolf‘s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway.
Michael Cunningham grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Stanford in 1975 and then an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1982. Two years later his first novel was published: Golden States (1984).
He followed that with A Home at the End of the World (1990), which Barnes & Noble called “a heartbreakingly lopsided love triangle between two gay men and their mutual female friend.”
He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993, then published Flesh and Blood in 1995. Cunningham then published The Hours, which won both the Pulitzer and Pen/Faulkner awards in 1999. It was made into a 2002 movie starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman.
His other books include the novels Specimen Days (2005) and By Nightfall (2010), and The Snow Queen (2014). He has also been a lecturer in the English Department at Yale University.
Extra credit
Other candidates for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999 were Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver… The movie version of The Hours was nominated for an Oscar as the best picture of 2002, but lost to Chicago. Nicole Kidman did win the Oscar as best actress for her performance as Virginia Woolf.