Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham is a contemporary American writer.

The future writer spent his childhood in Pasadena, California. In 1975, Cunningham received a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Stanford University, and five years later he completed a master’s degree at the University of Iowa. Cunningham began publishing in the late 1970s; his stories appeared in the pages of well-known American literary magazines (The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review). In 1989, Cunningham’s novella “White Angel,” which later became a chapter in A Home at the End of the World, was included in the annual collection of the best American short stories.

In 1990, Michael Cunningham published his first notable novel (his “zero novel,” Golden States, was released in a small print run and, at the author’s insistence, since he considered it unsuccessful, has not been reissued): A Home at the End of the World — a book about two young men and a woman caught up in their love and desires. In 2004, the novel was adapted into a film. Colin Farrell played the lead role in this low-budget picture.

His second novel, Flesh and Blood, a family saga about emigration, self-discovery, alternative culture, homosexuality, AIDS, and death, was first published in Russian in September 2010.

The writer’s third and most famous novel, The Hours, was published in 1998. It tells of one day in the lives of three women: the celebrated English writer Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, a 1950s Los Angeles housewife, and Clarissa Vaughan, a contemporary New York lesbian, whose fates are intricately connected with Woolf’s book Mrs Dalloway. The Hours brought Cunningham the Pulitzer Prize. In 2002, it was successfully adapted by British film director Stephen Daldry; the leading roles in the eponymous film were played by Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep. Cunningham himself can be seen in a cameo role as a passerby near the flower shop where Streep’s character buys a bouquet