“Siri Hustvedt writes, literally, like a dream – a dream that’s at once intensely romantic and disturbingly eerie.”
Salman Rushdie

Chairperson: Gail McConnell
Essayist, critic and novelist Siri Hustvedt is one of the most ambitious and original writers working today. Her non-fiction has encompassed everything from art history to neuroscience and she brings that same intellectual curiosity to her novels, working with a breathtaking palette of ideas and experimenting playfully with form. Yet her books are not dry, cerebral exercises. Her breakthrough novel, the international bestseller What I Loved, combines the intimacy of a family drama with the suspense of a thriller, while The Summer Without Men follows the blackly comic journey of a woman whose husband leaves her after thirty years of marriage.

Her new novel, The Blazing World, is a typically provocative work about the relations between men and women. After years of rejection by the art establishment, artist Harriet Burden decides to conceal her identity behind three different men. But when she steps forward to claim authorship of an exhibition by the famous international artist Rune, Burden finds herself locked into a dangerous psychological struggle that can only end in death. Framed by a scholar examining Burden’s notebooks, The Blazing World is a gripping mystery about money, fame, prejudice and desire.