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Barbara Kingsolver

Biography

Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955 and grew up in rural Kentucky. She earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and has worked as a freelance writer and author since 1985. At various times she has lived in England, France and the Canary Islands, and has worked in Europe, Africa, Asia, Mexico and South America. She spent two decades in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to southwestern Virginia where she currently resides.

Kingsolver was named one the most important writers of the 20th century by Writers Digest, and in 2023, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel DEMON COPPERHEAD. In 2000, she received the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts. Her books have been translated into more than 30 languages and have been adopted into the core curriculum in high schools and colleges throughout the nation.

Critical acclaim for her work includes multiple awards from the American Booksellers Association and the American Library Association, a James Beard award, two-time Oprah Book Club selection, and the National Book Award of South Africa, among others. She was awarded Britain's prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) for both DEMON COPPERHEAD and THE LACUNA, making Kingsolver the first author in the history of the prize to win it twice. In 2011, Kingsolver was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She has two daughters, Camille and Lily. She and her husband, Steven Hopp, live on a farm in southern Appalachia where they raise an extensive vegetable garden and Icelandic sheep.

Barbara Kingsolver

Books by Barbara Kingsolver

by Barbara Kingsolver - Fiction

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, DEMON COPPERHEAD is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

by Barbara Kingsolver - Fiction

How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. When the family’s one success story, an Ivy-educated son, is uprooted by tragedy, he seems likely to join them. In another time, a troubled husband and public servant asks, How can a man tell the truth, and be reviled for it? Science teacher Thatcher Greenwood’s employer forbids him to speak of the exciting work just published by Charles Darwin. His friendships with a female scientist and a renegade newspaper editor threaten to draw him into a vendetta with the town’s powerful men.

written and read by Barbara Kingsolver - Fiction

How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. When the family’s one success story, an Ivy-educated son, is uprooted by tragedy, he seems likely to join them. In another time, a troubled husband and public servant asks, How can a man tell the truth, and be reviled for it? Science teacher Thatcher Greenwood’s employer forbids him to speak of the exciting work just published by Charles Darwin. His friendships with a female scientist and a renegade newspaper editor threaten to draw him into a vendetta with the town’s powerful men.

by Barbara Kingsolver - Fiction

When Dellarobia Turnbow climbs a mountain near her farmhouse home, she has a mission: she will take a lover and change her boring life. But what she finds on the mountaintop appears to be not only a glowing apparition, but Mother Nature's tragic error. Her discovery will open her eyes, broadening her world and helping her find her place in it.

by Barbara Kingsolver - Fiction

Born in the United States, Harrison Shepher is reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico. One fateful day, he finds himself mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. He discovers a passion for Aztec history and meets the exotic, imperious artist Frida Kahlo. When he goes to work for Lev Trotsky, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution.

by Barbara Kingsolver - Nonfiction

Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.

by Barbara Kingsolver - Fiction

In 1959, Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist, takes his four young daughters, his wife, and his mission to the Belgian Congo --- a place, he is sure, where he can save needy souls. But the seeds they plant bloom in tragic ways within this complex culture.

by Barbara Kingsolver - Fiction

Alice Greer, her daughter Taylor, and Taylor's informally adopted daughter, Turtle, all seem fated to lives uncomplicated by relationships with men. But simplicity is gone forever when Taylor and Turtle (who is Cherokee) appear on TV by a coincidence of fate, and come to the attention of Annawake Fourkiller, a lawyer for the Cherokee nation.

by Barbara Kingsolver - Fiction

Looking to escape an oppressive upbringing in rural Kentucky, Marietta Greer heads west in a beat-up Volkswagen. By the time her car breaks down in Tucson, she has with her a stunned, silent three-year-old Cherokee girl who was, literally, dropped into her arms one night and who Marietta names Turtle. Here in Tucson, among a group of fellow travelers, Marietta and Turtle create new lives and redefine the meanings of home and family.