Siri Hustvedt was born in Northfield, Minnesota in 1955 and moved to New York City in 1978. She received a PhD in English literature at Columbia University in 1986. She is the author of four novels, The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, and The Sorrows of an American, as well as two nonfiction books, A Plea for Eros and Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting. Another work of nonfiction, The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves, a neurological memoir that explores the mind/body question, will be published in 2010.

Hustvedt’s work has appeared in numerous publications around the world including The Yale Review, The New York Times, Conjunctions, Modern Painters, The Guardian, Die Zeit, and Liberation. She has also given lectures on art at The Prado Museum in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.