Hunt, Nick
Entry updated 12 February 2024. Tagged: Author.
(? - ) UK author, most of whose work has been nonfiction meditations on travel, though The Parakeeting of London: An Adventure in Gonzo Ornithology (2019) amusedly adds speculations about budgerigars to the Matter of London. Loss Soup and Other Stories (coll of linked stories 2022) comprises a set of tales about lost worlds and lost lives conveyed to its compiler through the eponymous soup, which is distilled of extinguished things and beings. The tales themselves, set from several centuries ago to an Anthropocene Near Future at the verge of extinguishing itself, array a wide range of losses.
Hunt's first novel, Red Smoking Mirror (2023), like Laurent Binet's Civilizations (2019; trans Sam Taylor 2021), creates an Alternate History narrative of the "discovery" of America, the Jonbar Point being the failure of the Christians to take Granada in 1492 and thus end the Moorish "Golden Age" in the northern West; the discoverers are consequently Muslim traders. After two decades of peaceful concourse with Moctezuma's Tenochtitlan, disease and the imminent arrival of merciless religionists from Europe put paid to dreams of comity. Hunt's style as an author of fiction is spare, intense, apodictic. [JC]
Nick Hunt
born London.
works
- Loss Soup and Other Stories (Ottawa, Ontario: Greenbank Books, 2022) [coll: pb/]
- Red Smoking Mirror (London: Swift Press, 2023) [hb/Dan Mogford]
nonfiction (selected)
- The Parakeeting of London: An Adventure in Gonzo Ornithology (London: Paradise Road, 2019) [nonfiction: pb/]
links
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