Providence Author Hunt Finalist for National Book Award
Saturday, October 09, 2021
Providence resident Laird Hunt is one of five finalists for the National Book Award for Fiction.
Hunt’s novel Zorrie is just one of his critically acclaimed writings.
He is the author of eight novels, a collection of stories, and two book-length translations from French.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTPreviously, he has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, and The Bridge/Il Ponte Book Award.
He teaches in the Literary Arts Program at Brown University.
The publisher of Zorrie Bloomsbury Publishing writes about the novel:
“It was Indiana, it was the dirt she had bloomed up out of, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew.”
As a girl, Zorrie Underwood’s modest and hardscrabble home county was the only constant in her young life. After losing both her parents to diphtheria, Zorrie moved in with her aunt, whose own death orphaned Zorrie all over again, casting her off into the perilous realities and sublime landscapes of rural, Depression-era Indiana. Drifting west, Zorrie survived on odd jobs, sleeping in barns and under the stars, before finding a position at a radium processing plant. At the end of each day, the girls at her factory glowed from the radioactive material.
But when Indiana calls Zorrie home, she finally finds the love and community that have eluded her in the small town of Hillisburg. And yet, even as she tries to build a new life, Zorrie discovers that her trials have only begun.
Spanning an entire lifetime, a life convulsed and transformed by the events of the 20th century, Laird Hunt’s extraordinary novel offers a profound and intimate portrait of the dreams that propel one tenacious woman onward and the losses that she cannot outrun. Set against a harsh, gorgeous, quintessentially American landscape, this is a deeply empathetic and poetic novel that belongs on a shelf with the classics of Willa Cather, Marilynne Robinson, and Elizabeth Strout.
The final awards will be announced on November 17. Previous winners include Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, Adrienne Rich, Thomas Pynchon, and Alice Walker to name a few.
