The Poisonwood Bible
Award History
| Award | Year | Status |
|---|---|---|
| National Book Foundation Distinguished Contribution to American Letters | 2024 | Winner |
About This Book
The Price family—a domineering Baptist preacher and his wife and four daughters—travel to the Belgian Congo as missionaries in 1959, just as the country is beginning its struggle for independence from Belgium. Narrated by the five women of the family across forty years, the novel is simultaneously a domestic drama, a colonial history, and a meditation on American arrogance and its consequences.
About the Author
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 →
