Marilynne Robinson (1943–) is an American novelist and essayist. Born in Idaho, she taught creative writing for many years at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her debut novel, “Housekeeping,” which follows two sisters and the unsettled history of their family in a lakeside town, received the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. “Gilead,” written as an aging minister’s letter to his young son, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; its setting and characters reappear in “Home,” “Lila,” and “Jack.” Across her fiction and essays, Robinson examines family, solitude, forgiveness, Christian faith, American democracy, and human dignity.
