A Spotlight on Barbara Kingsolver

If you follow the latest book news, you’ll have spotted that Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, Demon Copperhead, has won the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction. This is the very same book for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. A dip into Wikipedia shows us that Kingsolver has won a bunch of different literary awards, including a previous gong for the Women’s Prize in 2010 for The Lacuna. This makes Kingsolver the first author to win this prize (formerly the Orange Prize and then the Bailey’s Prize) twice.

So let's take a look back at Kingsolver's career and the books that have made her a literary tour de force. Top of the list is her first book, The Bean Trees, which came out in 1998. It follows the story of a woman who becomes the guardian of an abandoned baby girl and the life they build together. It is followed by the sequel, Pigs in Heaven. The two books take the reader from rural Kentucky to Tuscon, Arizona and on to Heaven, Oklahoma and the Cherokee Nation.

Environmental issues crop up in several Kingsolver novels, including Animal Dreams, set in Arizona with “a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life’s largest commitments”. The Poisonwood Bible really brought Kingsolver to the world’s attention with a sweeping story about a missionary and his family amid political unrest in the Congo. The book was nominated for several awards, including the Bailey’s Prize; the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Prodigal Summer takes us to southern Appalachia, with an extended spell of hot weather and its affects on a struggling farming community, in particular, Deanne who lives alone with wolves for company and Lusa, struggling to make a profit from her land. It’s a quite different landscape from The Lacuna, which is set in Mexica and on to Pearl Harbour, including real historical characters, among them, F D Roosevelt, Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

In Flight Behaviour Kingsolver returns to Appalachia, where a restless farm wife becomes caught up in the strange appearance of a mass of monarch butterflies in the forest nearby and the resultant media storm. A new book and another of society’s problems, Unsheltered follows two families in the same house over two different time periods, the later narrative in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

Kingsolver is nothing if not original, and her most recent novel, Demon Copperhead, is a reimagining of the Dickens novel, David Copperfield. The book looks at the damaging effects of poverty, with a wide cast of characters and is both humorous and heart-breaking.

Reading through this list I am struck by both the humanity and the imaginative breadth of this author. I’ve only read a couple of them, so have a lot of catching up to do. Kingsolver seems a deserving winner of this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and gracious in her acceptance speech, saying that “fiction is the way we make our hearts grow bigger. And that’s how we change the world.” I couldn’t agree more.

Posted by JAM

19 June 2023

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