Marilynne Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an
American author. Her 1980 novel
Housekeeping (see
1980 in literature) won a
Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel and was nominated for the
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her second novel,
Gilead (see
2004 in literature), was acclaimed by critics and received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 2004
National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the 2005
Ambassador Book Award. Her third novel,
Home, published in 2008, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and won the 2009
Orange Prize for Fiction. Also in 2009, she held a
Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at
Yale University, giving a series of talks entitled
Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self.Biography
Robinson 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. in 1966. She received her
Ph.D. in English from the
University of Washington in 1977.
Robinson is also the author of
Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989) and
The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998). She has written articles and book reviews for
Harper’s,
The Paris Review, and
The New York Times Book Review.
She has been writer-in-residence or visiting professor at numerous universities, including the
University of Kent,
Amherst, and the
University of Massachusetts'
MFA Program for Poets & Writers. She teaches at the
Iowa Writers' Workshop and makes her home in Iowa City. Robinson took a sabbatical in fall 2007 to complete her third novel. Published in September 2008,
Home is a companion piece to
Gilead, focusing on the Boughton family during the same time period that
Gilead covers.
.
Works
Novels
Nonfiction
- Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989)
- The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998)
