Ben Shattuck

Ben Shattuck's most recent book, The History of Sound (Viking), was the recipient of the 2025 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. His film adaptation of the title story premiered at the 2025 Cannes film festival. His first book, Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau (Tin House), was a New Yorker Best Book of 2022, a New York Times Best Book of Summer, a New England Bestseller, and was nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is a recipient of the PEN Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and a Pushcart Prize. He spends time between Brooklyn and coastal Massachusetts, where he owns and runs the oldest general store in America, built in 1793.