Siri Hustvedt (born February 19, 1955) is an American novelist and essayist. Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, seven novels, two books of essays, and several works of non-fiction. Her books include The Blindfold (1992), The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), What I Loved (2003), for which she is best known, A Plea for Eros (2006), The Sorrows of an American (2008), The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2010), The Summer Without Men (2011), Living, Thinking, Looking (2012), The Blazing World (2014), and Memories of the Future (2019). What I Loved and The Summer Without Men were international bestsellers. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. Early life Daughter of professor Lloyd Hustvedt, Siri attended public school in her hometown, Northfield, Minnesota, and received a degree from the Cathedral School in Bergen, Norway, in 1973. She started writing at 13 after a family trip to Reykjavík, where she read various works of classic literature. Particularly impressed by Dickens's David Copperfield, she decided that she wanted to make literature her profession after finishing it. Hustvedt graduated from St. Olaf College with a B.A. in history in 1977. She moved to New York City to attend Columbia University as a graduate student in 1978. Her first published work was a poem in The Paris Review. Hustvedt lived in poverty during her college years, and resorted to an emergency loan from the university to survive. Career A small collection of poems, Reading to You, appeared in 1982 with Station Hill Press. She completed her PhD in English at Columbia in 1986. Her dissertation on Charles Dickens, Figures of Dust: A Reading of Our Mutual Friend, is an exploration of language and identity in the novel, with particular emphasis on Dickens's metaphors of fragmentation, his use of pronouns, and their relation to a narrative, dialogical conception of self. She refers in the dissertation to thinkers who influenced her later writing, including Søren Kierkegaard, Emile Benveniste, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Mary Douglas, Paul Ricoeur, and Julia Kristeva. After finishing her dissertation, Hustvedt began writing prose. Two stories of the four that would become her first novel, The Blindfold, were published in literary magazines and later included in Best American Short Stories 1990 and 1991. Since then she has continued to write fiction and publish essays on the intersections between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience.