About

Tess’s debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, is a New York Times Bestseller and the recipient of the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction. It has been translated into a dozen languages. The novel also received the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, the Waterstones Debut Fiction 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 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and the British Book Award for Debut Fiction. The Rabbit Hutch was named one of twelve Essential Reads by The New Yorker, and a best book of the year by: The New York Times, People, TIME, Oprah Daily, the Chicago Tribune, NPR, and others. It is currently a finalist for the inaugural Inside Literary Prize, the first literary prize in America to be determined by a panel of incarcerated judges. The novel has been optioned for film rights by Richard Brown (executive producer of True Detective, Outlaw King, and Catch-22) and Fremantle (Poor Things, Priscilla, My Brilliant Friend, Normal People). Tess is the youngest recipient of the National Book Award for fiction since Philip Roth won in 1960.

In addition to being published by Knopf in North America, The Rabbit Hutch is published by Oneworld (UK, Australia, India), Gallmeister (France), Guanda (Italy), Black Button Books (Romania), Kiepenheuer and Witsch (Germany), Kagge (Norway), Sexto Piso (Spain), Edicions de 1984 (Catalan), EunHaeng NaMu (South Korea), Kinneret Publishing House (Israel), Wydawnictwo Czarne (Poland), Jelenkor Publishing (Hungary), and Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial (Portugal).

Tess’s older brother, Nicholas Gunty, created the illustrations featured in The Rabbit Hutch. Based in Philadelphia, Nicholas is a visual artist, musician, and independent music producer. He is available for commission.

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 the Ernest Sandeen Award for her poetry collection. Upon graduating, she began an MFA in Creative Writing at New York University, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. As a master’s student, she received a Graduate Institute Research Fellowship to continue developing her thesis—an early version of The Rabbit Hutch—in Paris. Recently, she was a Paul La Farge Fellow at MacDowell, where she worked on her second novel.

Tess is a Writer in Residence in the Creative Writing Program at NYU, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate students. She lives between Brooklyn and upstate New York.

Inquiries:

Literary Agent: Duvall Osteen, UTA

• duvall.osteen@unitedtalent.com

Film/TV Agent: Brooke Ehrlich, CAA

• brooke.ehrlich@caa.com

Literary Publicist: Emily Reardon, Knopf

• ereardon@penguinrandomhouse.com

Speaking Engagements: Madeleine Denman, Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau

• mdenman@penguinrandomhouse.com