NEW YORK – Barbara Kingsolver, this year's recipient of a National Book Award medal for literary achievement, remembers well the years she couldn't imagine receiving such honors.
“I just felt this continuous skepticism, not from readers but from critics and the gatekeepers. It was on two counts,” Kingsolver, 69, said during a recent telephone interview. “One: Because I was a rural writer and I lived in a rural place. I’m not a New Yorker. I don’t write about city things, so that’s always sort of positioned me as an outsider. Two: I’m a woman, and, certainly 30 years ago that was a strike against the writer."
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On Friday, the National Book Foundation announced that Kingsolver was the 37th winner of its medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL), which has previously been given to Toni Morrison,Philip Roth and Joan Didion among others. Kingsolver's novels, including “The Bean Trees,” “The Poisonwood Bible” and “Animal Trees," have sold millions of copies and have touched upon social issues from immigration and drug abuse to the environment and income inequality.
Nominations for the medal, which includes a $10,000 cash prize, are made by former National Book Award winners, finalists, judges and other members of the literary community. Kingsolver will be honored during a Nov. 20 dinner ceremony in Manhattan, when winners in five competitive categories will be announced.
“I feel like I’ve been on this steady course, and it’s a remarkable and wonderful feeling to be appreciated and honored this way by my peers,” Kingsolver said. “It’s not someone outside the field. It’s the people who see literature as our livelihood and our spiritual anchor. And that means the world to me.”
At the ceremony, the Book Foundation will also present a lifetime achievement medal to activist-publisher W. Paul Coates for “outstanding service” to the American Literary Community. He will be introduced by his son, the author-journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, himself a National Book Award winner. Kingsolver will receive her award from her agent, Sam Stoloff of the Frances Goldin agency, whose eponymous founder was like a “mother to both Sam and me, so it felt perfect to me that we should stand together on this special occasion,” she said.
Kingsolver is being celebrated at a time when her career has never been stronger; her most recent novel, “Demon Copperhead,” was her most successful yet. A retelling of Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield,” the young narrator a boy from Appalachia, “Demon Copperhead” was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 and sold so well for so long as a hardcover that only this fall is it coming out in a paperback edition.
Kingsolver has received numerous other awards, including a National Humanities Medal, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction — twice. She even established her own award, the Bellwether Prize for Social Change, which has cited books by Lisa Ko and Gayle Brandeis among others.
“Barbara Kingsolver’s writing embraces the personal and the political, examining complex issues of social justice, exalting the natural world, and exploring progressive social change with care and specificity,” Foundation Executive Director Ruth Dickey said in a statement. “For Kingsolver, writing is a tool for community activism — a way of shining a light on some of the most intricate environmental and social injustices of our time, and an art form through which she can share stories of her beloved Appalachia with the world. We have all benefited from her brilliance."
Kingsolver is a native of Annapolis, Maryland, who has lived everywhere from the Republic of Congo to Tucson, Arizona, among other places. But she identifies most strongly with Appalachia, where she spent much of her childhood and has lived for the past 20 years, on a farm in southwest Virginia with her husband, Steven Hopp. Kingsolver majored in the sciences at DePauw University and the University of Arizona, worked as a freelance journalist in Arizona after graduating and unofficially launched her literary career when she won a local story writing contest.
Over the past generation, Kingsolver has seen changes she believes enabled voices like hers to be heard. When she started out, she says, the anti-Communist blacklists of the 1950 and 60s had still left the artistic landscape “scarred,” reluctant to take on issues beyond families and relationships. But more recently she has welcomed what she calls “green sprigs of grass,” writers such as Jesmyn Ward and Colson Whitehead who take on race, or the environmental fiction of Richard Powers. Her own work demonstrates that you can raise larger questions and sustain a mass readership.
“In another part of my life, I write op-ed pieces, I write letters to the editor of my local paper, I go to school board meetings. I know how to do that,” she says. “But that isn’t literature. Literature is not telling a reader what to think. There’s a modicum of condescension in any didactic work that you do. I leave that at the door to my writing. I never condescend to my readers. I never assume to know something they don’t.”
As a bestselling author, she has the rare luck to tour nationwide for her books and meet at least some of her fans — those, she notes, who are “at liberty to come to a reading,” often in urban settings. Kingsolver thinks of readers she wouldn't expect to turn up. She receives letters from Africa, from prison, from people who grew up in foster care.
“They all know things that I don't know,” she says. “I go into this as I would go into a conversation with a friend. I say, ‘Here’s something that troubles me. I wonder if it troubles you. Let's take a walk. I'm going to give you a story. I'm going to give you a reason to turn the page while we take this walk.'"
“I'm writing for anyone who wants to take that walk with me."
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This story corrects the spelling of the literary agency Frances Goldin.