Marilynne Robinson Award Winning Author
Robinson (née Summers) was born and grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho, and did her undergraduate work at Pembroke College, the former women’s college at Brown University, receiving her B.A., magna cum laude in 1966, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington in 1977.
Robinson has written three highly acclaimed novels: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). Housekeeping was a finalist for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (US), Gilead was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer, and Home received the 2009Orange Prize for Fiction (UK). Home is a companion to Gilead and focuses on the Boughton family during the same time period.
She is also the author of non-fiction works including Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989),The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), and When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012). She has written articles, essays and reviews forHarper’s, The Paris Review and The New York Times Book Review.
She has been writer-in-residence or visiting professor at many universities, including the University of Kent, Amherst, and theUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst‘ MFA Program for Poets and Writers. In 2009, she held a Dwight H. Terry Lectureship atYale University, giving a series of talks titled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. On April 19, 2010, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In May 2011 Robinson delivered Oxford University‘s annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters at the university’s Rothermere American Institute. She currently teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Iowa City. She was the keynote speaker for the Workshop’s 75th anniversary celebration in June 2011. On February 18, 2013, she was the speaker at the Easter Convocation of the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa.
Robinson was raised as a Presbyterian and later became a Congregationalist, worshipping and sometimes preaching at the Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City. Her Congregationalism, and her interest in the ideas of John Calvin, have been important in her works, including Gilead, which centers on the life and theological concerns of a fictional Congregationalist minister. In an interview with the Church Times in 2012, Robinson said: “I think, if people actually read Calvin, rather than read Max Weber, he would be rebranded. He is a very respectable thinker.”
The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has described Robinson as “one of the world’s most compelling English-speaking novelists”, and said: “Robinson’s is a voice we urgently need to attend to In both Church and society here [in the UK].” On January 24, 2013, Robinson was announced to be among the finalists for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize .
Awards
- 1980: Housekeeping – Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel; nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
- 1999: The Death of Adam – PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
- 2004: Gilead – 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction; 2005 Ambassador Book Award
- 2006: The recipient of the 2006 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion.
- 2008: Home – 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction; finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.
Collected Works
Novels
- Housekeeping (1980)
- Gilead (2004)
- Home (2008)
Nonfiction
- Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989)
- The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998)
- Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010)
- When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012)
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