Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist, and poet whose work has sold more than twenty-five million copies worldwide and who is widely regarded as one of the most important American literary novelists of her generation. Born in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1955, she grew up in rural Kentucky and studied biology and ecology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona—a scientific education that profoundly informs her writing about nature, environment, and the human relationship to the land. Kingsolver's major novels include The Bean Trees (1988), Prodigal Summer (2000), The Poisonwood Bible (1998)—her most celebrated work, a novel about a Baptist missionary family in the Congo during the era of decolonisation—and Flight Behavior (2012), which addresses climate change through the story of a woman in Appalachia. Her most recent novel Demon Copperhead (2022), a retelling of David Copperfield set during the opioid epidemic in Appalachian Virginia, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Women's Prize for Fiction. Kingsolver received the National Book Foundation's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2024. She is also the author of the celebrated narrative nonfiction Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007) and several essay collections. She lives on a farm in southwestern Virginia.