The Lacuna

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. Read more →