Childhood.
Barbara Kingsolver is a contemporary American writer and poet, laureate of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2010, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the American Literary PEN / Faulkner Award.
She was born on April 8, 1955, in Annapolis, state Maryland in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Little Barbara spent her childhood in Carlisle County in Kentucky. At the age of 7, she moved to Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Her parents got a job there in the health sector. After graduating from high school, Barbara entered the DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where she received a scholarship in music faculty studying classical piano, but soon switched to the biology course. During her studies, she participated in rallies against the war in Vietnam. In 1977, she received a bachelor’s degree and moved to France for one year. In 1980 continued her education and completed a master’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. Then she entered the postgraduate school, where she studied the social life of termites.
Early writing.
In the 1980s, Barbara began to study literature. She managed to win a short story contest in a local Phoenix newspaper and began her career in fiction writing. Since 1988, she has started to publish several of her fiction and scientifically popular works, as well as the collection of poems. At first, she appeared in newspapers and magazines. At the same time, she married a chemist Joseph Hoffman, and in 1987 she gave birth to a daughter. In 1992, she divorced her husband, and in 1995 married ornithologist Stephen Hopp. Scientific research in biology has largely determined the themes of her work: Barbara Kingsolver writes a lot about the interaction of man and ecosystems, the biological diversity of the planet. Her active civic position is reflected in addressing issues such as social inequality, illegal immigration, corruption, etc. Many of Barbara Kingsolver’s novels are marked by vivid female images.
Novels.
The first novel of Barbara Kingsolver ‘The Bean Trees’ was published in 1988. After this, the world saw two more novels. The first one was ‘Animal Dreams’ in 1990 and then ‘Pigs in Heaven’ in 1993, but the most famous for her was the novel ‘The Poisonwood Bible,’ published in 1998. This is a story about a family of an American Christian missionary who moved to the jungles of the Congo in the late 1950s, just at the time when this colonial country was fighting for independence. In this dramatic novel, with a dynamic and tense plot, the story is being told on behalf of five women. The wife and daughters of a priest depict a large-scale picture of a country that could not stand the yoke of colonialism and as a result was crushed by ‘democracy.’ Simultaneously with the political crisis, Barbara Kingsolver describes the forcible imposition of the Christian religion among the natives. The author uses African coloring with skillful precision. She depicts the change in the views of foreigners to Africa in the illustrative example of the heroes of the novel and also shows the difficulties that inevitably arise in the collision of such different cultures. The novel became the winner of the National Book Award of South Africa and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Literature and the American Literary PEN / Faulkner Award.
Popularity & later life.
Writing ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ made Barbara Kingsolver popular. She continued her career as a writer and novelist. Since 2004, she has lived with her husband and two daughters on a farm in Washington, Virginia. The book ‘Animal, Vegetable, Miracle’ is a chronicle of an experiment that Barbara began in April 2005 with her family. After settling on a farm, they switched to ‘local’ food, eating only what they have grown themselves or bought from neighbors. In 2008, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Duke University, where she delivered a commencement address entitled ‘How to be Hopeful.’ Her next popular novel ‘The Lacuna’ was published in 2009 and won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010. In a 2010 interview with ‘The Guardian,’ Barbara Kingsolver says, ‘I never wanted to be famous, and still don’t, the universe rewarded me with what I dreaded most.’ She said she created her own website to compete with a plethora of fake ones, ‘as a defense to protect my family from misinformation. Wikipedia abhors a vacuum. If you don’t define yourself, it will get done for you in colorful ways’.