The End We Start From

Megan Hunter was born in Manchester, England, in 1984. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Sussex University and later pursued a Master of Philosophy in English literature from Jesus College, Cambridge. During her studies, she was particularly attracted to poetry, and she wrote and published multiple poems before trying her hand at writing fiction.

Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and her short story “Selfing” was nominated for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her background in poetry has influenced her writing style as a novelist; in a 2018 interview with Propeller magazine, Hunter remarked that before beginning The End We Start From:

I had been experimenting with text that was condensed, lyrical, somewhere between prose and poetry, but it hadn’t been working without a strong narrative. In The End We Start From the voice came straight away, a real gift, and from this the narrative.

The form was the same from the very beginning—I wrote the first chapter quickly and actually didn’t change it very much throughout the editing process. But that “easy” start conceals years of thinking about the differences between poetry and prose, experimenting with form, voice, and narrative to try to create a combination that worked (Prieto, Thea.