Megan Hunter

Last updated

Megan Hunter
Born1984 (age 3940)
Manchester
OccupationNovelist, poet
CitizenshipUnited Kingdom
Alma mater University of Sussex
Jesus College, Cambridge
Period2017–present
Notable worksThe End We Start From (2017) The Harpy (2020)

Megan Hunter (born 1984) is an English novelist and poet. She is best known for her debut novel The End We Start From (2017), a climate disaster survival story which was adapted into a movie of the same name, released in 2023.

Contents

Early life and education

Megan Hunter was born in Manchester in 1984. [1] She wanted to write from childhood. [2] She earned a Bachelor's degree in English literature from University of Sussex, followed by a Master of Philosophy in English Literature: Criticism and Culture from Jesus College, Cambridge. [1]

Career

Hunter's work has appeared in The White Review , The Times Literary Supplement , Literary Hub, and BOMB. [3]

Her debut novel The End We Start From was published by Picador in 2017 and follows an environmental crisis in the UK which forces a new mother and her baby to abandon their home in London and flee north. Hunter cites conversations with her children about life and death and her own experiences with motherhood as inspiration for her first novel: "My own children regularly ask about death, and they have also asked me who or where they were before they were born. Partly because of this questioning I often feel the closeness of birth and death, the ways in which they are both the thresholds of life." [4]

Accolades

Hunter's poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. Her short story "Selfing" was nominated for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. [1]

Her debut novel The End We Start From was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award finalist in 2017 and won the Foreword Reviews Editor's Choice Award; it was also longlisted for the inaugural Aspen Words Literary Prize. [5] [6]

Personal life

Hunter is married to a psychotherapist. They have two children. [7]

Bibliography

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References

  1. 1 2 3 "Biography Megan Hunter". www.bookreporter.com. Retrieved 12 October 2022.
  2. Duerden, Nick (11 December 2020). "'A male crime writer wouldn't have people wondering whether he was a serial killer'". inews.co.uk.
  3. The End We Start From | Grove Atlantic.
  4. "A 1970s book of creation myths inspired Megan Hunter's apocalyptic "The End We Start From"". Propeller. Retrieved 24 January 2022.
  5. Noble, Barnes &. "The Harpy: A Novel". Barnes & Noble. Retrieved 24 January 2022.
  6. Ehnes, Caley (1 January 2019), "Middle-Class Audiences, Literary Weeklies and the Inaugural Poem: Household Words, All the Year Round and Once a Week", Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 22–57, doi:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474418348.003.0002, ISBN   978-1-4744-1834-8 , retrieved 24 January 2022
  7. Duerden, Nick (11 December 2020). "'A male crime writer wouldn't have people wondering whether he was a serial killer'". inews.co.uk.