![]() ![]() With its deep-rooted evocation of place, epic scope and powerful moral purpose, Demon Copperhead is undoubtedly the defining novel of an already distinguished career. Largely written during the pandemic, its subject is another epidemic: the opioid crisis, of which Appalachia was “ground zero”. ![]() This DNA is stamped on every one of the 550 pages of her bravura retelling of Dickens’s David Copperfield, relocated to her native state and updated to the 1990s. Raised in Kentucky, Kingsolver describes herself as “Appalachian, through and through”. I feel like I’m an ambassador between these worlds, trying to explain that if you want to have a conversation you don’t start it with the words, ‘You idiot.’” “That contempt of urban culture for half the country. ![]() “I understand why rural people are so mad they want to blow up the system,” she says. “I’ve done things that risk my wedding band, I’ll just put it like that,” she says, laughing.īarbara Kingsolver with fellow Women’s prize for fiction shortlistees Jacqueline Crooks, Priscilla Morris, Laline Paul, Louise Kennedy and Maggie O’Farrell. When she is not writing, she turns her hand to delivering breach lambs. And yet, she rarely leaves the farm in the mountains of south-west Virginia, where she lives with her husband. She counts Hillary Clinton as a friend and was invited to lunch at the White House with Barack Obama – “One of the most magnetically attractive human beings” – who quizzed her for writing tips. Best-known for her mega-selling 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna, which won the Women’s (then Orange) prize in 2010, she has taken on uncomfortable subjects such as American colonialism and climate change. With a Susan-Sontag silver streak in her hair and steely good humour, 68-year-old Kingsolver is a quiet titan of American literature. It’s my upbringing, I was raised in a culture of modesty.” I don’t want to take something that would be more helpful to someone else. “Guilty and delighted,” she says over coffee in a London hotel, the morning after winning the prize for her tenth novel Demon Copperhead. ‘Guilty!” American novelist Barbara Kingsolver says when I ask how she feels to become the first writer to win the Women’s prize for fiction twice. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |