Siri Hustvedt
Siri Hustvedt
Siri Hustvedt is an American writer known for novels, essays, and poetry. Born in 1955, she has written seven novels, two books of essays, poetry, and nonfiction. Her work often explores how we think, feel, and see the world, blending ideas from literature, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. One of her most famous books is What I Loved (2003).
Early life
Siri Hustvedt grew up in Northfield, Minnesota, the daughter of an American professor and a Norwegian mother. She spoke English and Norwegian at home. She finished school in Bergen, Norway, in 1973. At 13 she began writing after reading classic literature in Reykjavík. She studied history at St. Olaf College and earned a BA in 1977, then moved to New York City to study at Columbia University. Her first published poem appeared in The Paris Review. She faced financial hardship during college and even took an emergency loan to get by.
Education and influences
Hustvedt earned a PhD in English from Columbia University in 1986. Her dissertation, about Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, looked at language, identity, and how narrative creates the self. She was influenced by thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Emile Benveniste, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva.
Career
Hustvedt began with poetry, including Reading to You (1982). She wrote The Blindfold (1992), her first novel, which helped launch a long fiction career. She has written novels, essays, and works on visual art, often linking philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. She has lectured internationally, including at the Prado and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and published books on painting such as Mysteries of the Rectangle. She has given lectures in Europe and North America and has served as a lecturer in psychiatry at Cornell University’s Weill Institute.
Themes
Her writing often examines identity, selfhood, and perception. She explores how minds and bodies are connected, and how gender and relationships shape experience. Her characters frequently face traumatic events that challenge their sense of self. Hustvedt also looks at ethics in art and how looking and understanding others influence our lives.
Awards and honors
Hustvedt has received many honors. She was named an honorary doctor at the University of Oslo in 2014 and received other honorary degrees in France and Germany. She won the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for The Blazing World and the 2012 Gabarron International Award for Thought and Humanities. In 2019 she received the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature. In 2024 Vanity Fair’s Openbank Literature Award recognized her literary career.
Personal life
She married writer Paul Auster in 1982, and they lived in Brooklyn, New York, until his death in 2024. Their daughter, Sophie Auster, is a singer and actress.
Selected books (poetry, fiction, nonfiction)
- Poetry: Reading to You (1982)
- Fiction: The Blindfold (1992); The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996); What I Loved (2003); The Sorrows of an American (2008); The Summer Without Men (2011); The Blazing World (2014); Memories of the Future (2019)
- Nonfiction: Yonder (1998); Mysteries of the Rectangle (2005); A Plea for Eros (2005); The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2009); Living, Thinking, Looking (2012); A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women (2016); Mothers, Fathers, and Others (2021)
- Translation and related work: She has translated and edited other authors’ work and contributed essays on art, memory, and perception.
Siri Hustvedt’s writing invites readers to consider how people think and feel, how art affects us, and how our senses of self are shaped by body, mind, and culture.
This page was last edited on 1 February 2026, at 20:48 (CET).