Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Hannah Tinti is the author of the bestselling novel The Good Thief, which won The Center for Fiction's first novel prize, and the story collection Animal Crackers, a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, is an Indie-Next bestseller and has been optioned for television. She teaches creative writing at New York University's MFA program and co-founded the Sirenland Writers Conference. Tinti is also the co-founder and executive editor of One Story magazine, which won the AWP Small Press Publisher Award, and the PEN/Magid Award for Excellence in Editing.
Hannah Tinti's website
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Karen Russell: I'm always curious where other writers begin. What was the first image you had for this book? Did you start with Hawley and his daughter, Loo, in their current lives, or did you begin with the secrets of Hawley's past?
Hannah Tinti: The first spark of this novel came from my desire to write a love story. One of my favorite books is Jane Eyre, and the moment she meets Mr. Rochester is such an iconic scene - he is literally thrown at her feet. So I started by sketching out my own meeting of two people (which is actually still in the book - when Marshall washes up at Loo's feet from the ocean). Once I had that boy and girl together, I wrote a paragraph for each of their backgrounds, and that included a description of the girl and her father clamming on the shore. Right away, the father began to dominate and take over the story. He was a lot more interesting than the boy or the girl. But what was his name? While walking through one of the old cemeteries in Salem, Massachusetts, where I grew up, I came across one that struck me: Samuel Hawley.
Hawley's name and those brief paragraphs were fragments that I carried around with me for months. They didn't come together until I sat down and ...
Novelist, biographer, and poet Peter Ackroyd was born in London on October 5, 1949.
He graduated from Clare College, Cambridge, and studied at Yale University as a Mellon Fellow, where he completed Notes for a New Culture: ...
(more)
If you enjoyed:
The Good Thief
Try:
The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein
by Peter Ackroyd
Ian Caldwell attended Princeton University, where he studied history. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1998. He began writing The Rule of Four with his best friend, Dustin Thomason, after graduation. His second book, The Fifth ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley
Try:
The Rule of Four
by Ian Caldwell
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