Marilynne Robinson

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Marilynne Robinson
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Marilynne Robinson at the 2012 Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College.
Born (1943-11-26) November 26, 1943 (age 80)
Sandpoint, Idaho, United States
Occupation Novelist, essayist
Nationality American
Notable works Housekeeping (1980)
Gilead (2004)
Home (2008)
Lila (2014)
Notable awards Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award (1981)
National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (2004, 2014)
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2005)
Orange Prize for Fiction (2009)
National Humanities Medal (2012)

Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an American novelist and essayist. She has received several awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005 and the 2012 National Humanities Medal.[1]

Biography

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.[2][3]

Robinson has written four highly acclaimed novels: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014). Housekeeping was a finalist for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (US), Gilead was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer, and Home received the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction (UK). Home is a companion to Gilead and focuses on the Boughton family during the same time period.[4][5]

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), When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012), and "The Givenness of Things: Essays" (2015). She has written articles, essays and reviews for Harper’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 the University of Massachusetts Amherst' MFA Program for Poets and Writers. In 2009, she held a Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale 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.[6] 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. In 2012, Brown University awarded Robinson the degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa. 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. Holy Cross College, Notre Dame, Amherst College, Skidmore College and Oxford University have also awarded Robinson honorary degrees. She has been elected a fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford University.

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.[7][8] 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.[9] 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."[10]

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]."[11] On January 24, 2013, Robinson was announced to be among the finalists for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.[12]

On June 26, 2015, President Barack Obama quoted Robinson in his eulogy for the Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In speaking about "an open heart," President Obama said: "[w]hat a friend of mine, the writer Marilynne Robinson, calls 'that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.'” [13]

Bibliography

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Fiction

Nonfiction

Books

Essays and reporting

Title Year First published Reprinted/collected
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Awards

References

  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Dave Itzkoff, "Marilynne Robinson Wins Orange Prize", The New York Times, June 3, 2009.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ "Marilynne Robinson interview: The faith behind the fiction", Reform, September 2010.
  8. ↑ "Marilynne Robinson", Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, September 18, 2009.
  9. ↑ "Marilynne Robinson", Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, March 18, 2005.
  10. ↑ Wroe, Martin, "A minister of the word", Church Times, 22 June 2012
  11. ↑ Williams, Rowan, "Mighty plea for reasonableness", Church Times, 12 August 2012
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ "Five books for 2014", The Economist November 21, 2013
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. ↑ President Obama to Award 2012 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal Whitehouse.gov, retrieved 30 June 2013
  20. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

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