Samantha Hunt (born May 15, 1971) is an American novelist, essayist and short-story writer.

She is the author of The Dark Dark and The Unwritten Book, published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux; The Seas, published by MacAdam/Cage and Tin House;^[1] and the novels Mr. Splitfoot and The Invention of Everything Else,^[2] published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Hunt was born the youngest of six children^[3] in 1971. Her father was an editor, her mother is a painter.^[4] She moved in 1989 to attend the University of Vermont,^[5] where she studied literature, printmaking and geology. She received her MFA from Warren Wilson College, before moving to New York City in 1999.^[4]

Hunt's debut novel, The Seas, first published in 2004, is a magical-realist novel about a young girl in a Northern town who believes herself to be a mermaid.^[6] The book was voted one of the Village Voice Literary Supplement's Favorite Books of 2004,^[7] and won the National Book Foundation award for "5 under 35" in 2006.^[8] In 2018, The Seas was republished by Tin House Books in 2018 with a foreword by Maggie Nelson.^[7]

In 2008, she published her second novel, The Invention of Everything Else through Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The novel provides a fictionalized account of the final days of inventor Nikola Tesla. It won both the Bard Fiction Prize in 2010, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.^[9]

Her other novels include Mr. Splitfoot (2016), a ghost story,^[10] and The Dark Dark: Stories (2017), a collection of short stories.

Hunt's short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, McSweeney's, The Atlantic, A Public Space, Cabinet, Esquire, The Believer, Blind Spot, Harper’s Bazaar, The Village Voice, Seed Magazine, Tin House, New York Magazine, on the radio program This American Life and in a number of anthologies including Trampoline edited by Kelly Link. Hunt's play, The Difference Engine, a story about the life of Charles Babbage, was produced by the Theater of a Two-Headed Calf.

Hunt won the Bard Fiction Prize,^[11] the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 award,^[12] the St. Francis College Literary Prize^[13] and was a finalist for the Orange Prize.^[14] In 2017, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction.^[15]

Hunt's credits her experiences growing up one of six children for her interest in literature,^[16] her dialogue,^[17] and her fictional portrayals of motherhood.^[3]

Hunt is a professor of writing at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.^[10]

• The Unwritten Book (2022)
• The Dark Dark: Stories (2017)
• Mr Splitfoot (2016)
• The Invention of Everything Else (2008) Reading at Google
• The Seas (2004)
• My Inventions and Other Writings by Nikola Tesla and Samantha Hunt (introduction - 2011)

• "A Love Story", The New Yorker, 22 May 2017^[18]
• "The Yellow", The New Yorker, 21 November 2010^[19]
• "Three Days", The New Yorker, 8 January 2016^[20]
• "Go Team", The Atlantic, March 2020^[21]

• "There Is Only One Direction", New York Magazine, 12 May 2015^[22]
• "Queer Theorem", Lapham's Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 2, Spring 2017^[23]
• "Terrible Twins", The New York Times Magazine, 1 April 2011^[24]
• "Swiss Near-Miss", This American Life, 11 June 2014^[25]
• "A Brief History of Books That Do Not Exist", Lithub, 4 January 2016^[26]

• The New York Times [1]
• Interview at Bookslut
• Interview on the Bat Segundo Show