Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is an American author of German and Ojibwe descent and one of the most celebrated novelists in the United States. Born in Little Falls, Minnesota, in 1954, she is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. She studied at Dartmouth College and received her MFA from Johns Hopkins University. Erdrich is the author of more than sixteen novels, poetry collections, and children's books. Her fiction frequently centers on the experiences of Native American communities in the upper Midwest and the generations of family history that shape the present. Her major works include Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Plague of Doves (2008), and The Night Watchman (2020), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Round House (2012) won the National Book Award for Fiction and the Indies Choice Book Award for Adult Fiction in 2013. Erdrich is the co-owner of Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore in Minneapolis that specialises in Native American literature and culture. She has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction and many other honours. She lives in Minneapolis.