Michael Cunningham is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is Professor in the Practice of Creative Writing at Yale University.

The Hours, a 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham, is a tribute to Virginia Woolf's 1923 work Mrs. Dalloway; Cunningham emulates elements of Woolf's writing style while revisiting some of her themes within different settings. The Hours won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was later made into an Oscar-winning 2002 film of the same name.