Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver (born April 8, 1955) is an American fiction writer. She has written several novels, poems, short stories, and essays, and established the Bellwether Prize for "literature of social change."

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[edit] Biography

Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland but was raised near Carlisle, Kentucky, "in the middle of an alfalfa field... between the opulent horse farms and the impoverished coal fields." [1] Her parents were medical and public-health workers who briefly embarked on an expedition to the Congo when Kingsolver was a child. Kingsolver describes her childhood as a rather solitary one, and used the time she spent by herself to stimulate an “elaborate life of the mind."

Kingsolver attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana on a music scholarship, studying classical piano. Eventually, however, she changed her major to biology.

In the late 1970s, Kingsolver lived in a number of places, including Greece, France, and Tucson, Arizona, working variously as an archaeological digger, copy editor, housecleaner, biological researcher and translator. She earned a Master's degree in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. She then took a job as a science writer for the university. The science writing led to some freelance feature writing and journalism. In 1986, she won an Arizona Press Club award for outstanding feature writing. Her first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988.

Her subsequent books were Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (non-fiction); a short story collection, Homeland and Other Stories (1989); the novels Animal Dreams (1990), Pigs in Heaven (1993), The Poisonwood Bible (1998) and Prodigal Summer (2000); a poetry collection, Another America (1992); the essay collections High Tide in Tucson(1995) and Small Wonder: Essays (2002); and Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands, prose poetry with the photographs of Annie Griffiths Belt. The Poisonwood Bible (1998) was a bestseller that won the National Book Prize of South Africa, made finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner award, and was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection. In 2000, Barbara was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Bill Clinton.

In 1995, Kingsolver was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from her alma mater, DePauw University.

Barbara Kingsolver lives with her husband Steven Hopp and their two daughters, Camille and Lily, on a farm in Southwest Virginia.

[edit] Literary themes

Community, economic injustice and cultural difference inform the themes of Kingsolver's work. In The Bean Trees, the main character meets a family of Guatemalan immigrants who were forced to leave their daughter behind to escape torture and death in their home country. In The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver examined the role of the United States and other political powers in colonial and post-colonial Africa. Her book Pigs in Heaven examines the conflicts between individual and community rights, through a story about a Cherokee child adopted out of her tribe.

Kingsolver has said, "If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread." [2]

[edit] Books

Kingsolver's forthcoming nonfiction book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, explores the modern food industry via a narrative of a year in which the author and her family attempted to eat only food they grew themselves or purchased from nearby farms. It will be published in Spring 2007 by HarperCollins and in the UK by Faber and Faber.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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