Tess Gunty is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Rabbit Hutch, which won the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction. The novel also received the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Open Bank Vanity Fair Award for Best New Author in Spain, the British Book Award for Debut Fiction, and the Mark Twain American Voice Award. Named one of twelve Essential Reads by The New Yorker and a best book of the year by The New York Times, NPR, Oprah Daily, TIME, and others, the novel is currently a finalist for the inaugural Inside Literary Prize, the first literary award in America to be determined by a panel of incarcerated judges. The Rabbit Hutch has been translated into twelve languages and optioned for film adaptation.  

Born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, Tess studied English with an honors concentration in creative writing at the University of Notre Dame, where she won a theater award for her play and the Ernest Sandeen Award for her poetry collection. She left Indiana at the age of twenty-two to pursue a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at New York University, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. There, she began working on The Rabbit Hutch, a polyphonic ode to postindustrial Indiana. She is currently a Writer in Residence at New York University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate students. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Freeman’s, Joyland, The Iowa Review, Granta, and other publications. She now lives between Brooklyn and upstate New York.