Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer and Pen/Faulkner prizes, The Hours is a daring and deeply affecting novel inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf. A passionate, profound and haunting story of love and inheritance, hope and despair. Exiled in Richmond in the 1920s, taken from her beloved Bloomsbury and lovingly watched over by her husband Leonard, Virginia Woolf struggles to tame her rebellious mind and make a start on her new novel. In the brooding heat of 1940s Los Angeles, a young wife and mother yearns to escape the claustrophobia of suburban domesticity and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway. And in New York in the 1990s, Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich Village apartment and goes shopping for flowers for the party she is giving in honour of her life-long friend Richard, an award-winning poet whose mind and body are being ravaged by AIDS. These are the characters in Michael Cunningham's exquisite and deeply moving novel, which takes Woolf's life and work as inspiration for a meditation on artistic behaviour, failure, love and madness. Moving effortlessy across the decades and between England and America, Cunningham's elegant, haunting prose explores the pain and trauma of creativity and the immutable relationship between writer and reader.

迈克尔•坎宁安，美国当代著名作家，生于一九五二年，曾先后在斯坦福大学和爱荷华大学学习文学和写作。在爱荷华大学作家坊学习期间，开始在《大西洋月刊》和《巴黎评论》上发表短篇小说。一九九〇出版《末世之家》，受到广泛赞誉。选自《末世之家》的《白天使》被收录在《一九八九年美国最佳短篇小说》。一九九五年获得怀廷作家奖。

一九九八年的作品《时时刻刻》获得巨大成功，登上《纽约时报》畅销书榜，同时获得普利策奖和笔会福克纳奖，并被改编成同名电影，妮可•基德曼凭借该部影片摘得第七十五届奥斯卡最佳女主角奖。

一九九九年获得欧•亨利短篇小说奖。二〇〇五年，沉潜七年推出的新作《试验年代》同样备受好评。坎宁安目前在耶鲁大学担任创造性写作课程教授，同时继续创作。