Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver (born April 8, 1955) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet.

Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally.

In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead.

Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.

Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland, the daughter of Wendell R. Kingsolver and his wife Virginia (Henry) Kingsolver, in 1955 and grew up in Carlisle, Kentucky.

When Kingsolver was seven, her father, a physician, took the family to Léopoldville, Congo (now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Her parents worked in a public health capacity, and the family lived without electricity or running water.

After graduating from high school, Kingsolver attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, on a music scholarship, studying classical piano.

She changed her major to biology after realizing that "classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of [them] get to play ' Blue Moon ' in a hotel lobby".

She was involved in activism on her campus and took part in protests against the Vietnam war.

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Science in 1977, and moved to France for a year before settling in Tucson, Arizona, where she lived for much of the next two decades.

In 1980, she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Arizona, where she earned a master's degree in ecology and evolutionary biology.

Kingsolver began her full-time writing career in the mid-1980s as a science writer for the University of Arizona, which eventually led to freelance feature writing, including many cover stories for the local alternative weekly, the Tucson Weekly.

She began her career in fiction writing after winning a short-story contest in a local Phoenix newspaper.

In 1985, she married Joseph Hoffmann; their daughter Camille was born in 1987.

She moved with her daughter to Tenerife in the Canary Islands for a year during the first Gulf War, mostly due to frustration over America's military involvement.

Kingsolver's first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988, and told the story of a young woman who leaves Kentucky for Arizona, adopting an abandoned child along the way; she wrote it at night while pregnant with her first child and struggling with insomnia.

In the late 1990s, she was a founding member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock-and-roll band made up of published writers.

Other band members included Amy Tan, Matt Groening, Dave Barry, and Stephen King, and they played for one week during the year.

Kingsolver played the keyboard, but is no longer an active member of the band.

Her next work of fiction, published in 1990, was Homeland and Other Stories, a collection of short stories on a variety of topics exploring various themes from the evolution of cultural and ancestral lands to the struggles of marriage.

The novel Animal Dreams was also published in 1990, followed by Pigs in Heaven, the sequel to The Bean Trees, in 1993.

Every book that Kingsolver has written since Pigs in Heaven has been on The New York Times Best Seller list.

After returning to the United States in 1992, she separated from her husband.

Each of her books published since 1993 has been on the New York Times Best Seller list.

Kingsolver was raised in rural Kentucky, lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood, and currently lives in the Appalachia area of the United States.

She earned degrees in biology, ecology, and evolutionary biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels.

In 1994, Kingsolver was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters from her alma mater, DePauw University.

In the same year, she married Steven Hopp, an ornithologist, and their daughter Lily was born in 1996.

The Poisonwood Bible, published in 1998, is one of her best-known works; it chronicles the lives of the wife and daughters of a Baptist missionary on a Christian mission in Africa.

Although the setting of the novel is somewhat similar to Kingsolver's own childhood in the Democratic Republic of Congo (then "the Democratic Republic of Zaire"), the novel is not autobiographical.

In 2000, Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize to support "literature of social change".

In 2004, Kingsolver moved with her family to a farm in Washington County, Virginia.

In 2008, she received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Duke University, where she delivered a commencement address entitled "How to Be Hopeful".

After winning for The Lacuna in 2010 and Demon Copperhead in 2023, Kingsolver became the first author to win the Women's Prize for Fiction twice.

In a 2010 interview with The Guardian, Kingsolver said, "I never wanted to be famous, and still don't… the universe rewarded me with what I dreaded most".

She said she created her own website just to compete with a plethora of fake ones "as a defense to protect my family from misinformation".

Kingsolver lives in the Appalachia area of the United States.

Kingsolver has received numerous awards, including the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award 2011 and the National Humanities Medal.

She said in 2020 that rural America is generally regarded by artistic elites with "a profound antipathy".