Barbara Kingsolver

Writing career

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.

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. 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.

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 Zaire), the novel is not autobiographical. The novel was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection. The Poisonwood Bible won the National Book Prize of South Africa and was shortlisted for both the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award.

Her next novel, published in 2000, was Prodigal Summer, set in southern Appalachia. In 2000, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by the U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Kingsolver wrote a Los Angeles Times opinion piece following the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11 attacks, which received widespread criticism for conflating innocent Afghans with the Taliban regime. She wrote, "I feel like I'm standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming at each other, 'He started it!' and throwing rocks that keep taking out another eye, another tooth. I keep looking around for somebody's mother to come on the scene saying, 'Boys! Boys! Who started it cannot possibly be the issue here. People are getting hurt.'" By some accounts, she was "denounced as a traitor," but rebounded from these accusations and later wrote about them.

Starting in April 2005, Kingsolver and her family spent a year making every effort to eat food produced as locally as possible. Living on their farm in rural Virginia, they grew much of their own food and obtained most of the rest from their neighbors and other local farmers. Kingsolver, her husband, and her elder daughter chronicled their experiences of that year in the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, published in 2007. Although exceptions were made for staple ingredients not available locally, such as coffee and olive oil, the family grew vegetables, raised livestock, made cheese, and preserved much of their harvest. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle won the 2008 James Beard Foundation Award.

Kingsolver returned to novel-writing with The Lacuna, published in 2009. Kingsolver received her first Women's Prize for Fiction for the novel in 2010. The Lacuna won the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction. Flight Behavior was published in 2012. It explores environmental themes and highlights the potential effects of global warming on the monarch butterfly.

In 2011, Kingsolver was the first ever recipient of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. The newly named award to celebrate the U.S. diplomat who played an instrumental role in negotiating the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. In 2014, Kingsolver was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Library of Virginia. The award recognizes outstanding and long-lasting contributions to literature by a Virginian. In 2018 the Library of Virginia named her one of the Virginia Women in History.

Unsheltered was published in 2018 and follows two families in Vineland, New Jersey with one in the 1800s and the other in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Her latest book, published in 2022, is Demon Copperhead. The novel was inspired by David Copperfield and is set in southern Appalachia, dealing with the effects of the opioid crisis on the region's families. In 2023, Demon Copperhead received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction alongside Hernan Diaz's Trust, the first time the award was shared in its history.

Kingsolver is also a published poet and essayist. Two of her essay collections, High Tide in Tucson (1995) and Small Wonder (2003), have been published, and an anthology of her poetry was published in 1998 under the title Another America. A second collection of poetry, entitled How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) was published in 2020. Her essay "Where to Begin" appears in the anthology Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting (2013), published by W. W. Norton & Company. Her prose poetry also accompanied photographs by Annie Griffiths Belt in a 2002 work titled Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands.

Her major nonfiction works include her 1990 publication Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 and 2007's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a description of eating locally. She has also been published as a science journalist in periodicals such as Economic Botany on topics such as desert plants and bioresources.

Bellwether Prize

In 2000, Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize for Fiction. Named for the bellwether, the literary prize supports writers whose works support positive social change. The award is given to a U.S. citizen for a previously unpublished work of fiction that addresses issues of social justice. The Bellwether Prize is awarded in even-numbered years and includes guaranteed major publication and a cash prize of US$25,000, fully funded by Kingsolver. She has stated that she wanted to create a literary prize to "encourage writers, publishers, and readers to consider how fiction engages visions of social change and human justice". In May 2011, the PEN American Center announced it would take over administration of the prize, to be known as the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.

Literary style and themes

Kingsolver has written novels in both the first-person and third-person narrative styles, and she frequently employs overlapping narratives.

Kingsolver often writes about places and situations with which she is familiar; many of her stories are based in places she has lived, such as Central Africa, Arizona, and Appalachia. She has stated that her novels are not autobiographical, although there are often commonalities between her life and her work. Her work is often strongly idealistic and has been called a form of activism.

Her characters are frequently written around struggles for social equality, such as the hardships faced by undocumented immigrants, the working poor, and single mothers. Other common themes in her work include the balancing of individuality with the desire to live in a community, and the interaction and conflict between humans and the ecosystems in which they live. Kingsolver has been said to use prose and engaging narratives to make historical events, such as the Congo's struggles for independence, more interesting and engaging for the average reader.