Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, a retelling of Dickens’ David Copperfield set in rural Appalachia, won her the Pulitzer Prize and the UK’s Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2023. It is but the latest in a series of acclaimed novels in which she explores memory, history, landscape and American identity....
Born in Annapolis, Maryland in 1955, Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky, which forms the setting for several of her works. In 1963 her father, a doctor, went to work in a remote village in the Republic of Congo, taking the family with him – an experience that would inspire her 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible.
After studying classical piano and then biology – ‘in the hope of earning a living’ – Barbara moved to Tucson, Arizona, and became a science writer. Her work was published in journals such as Economic Botany and ecology and our relation to the environment would later inform her fiction.
Kingsolver began publishing poetry and short fiction in the mid-1980s, around the time she married Joe Hoffmann, a chemist at the University of Arizona, and wrote her first full-length book, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike. It was taken up by a literary agent in New York but did not find a publisher until the end of the decade.
By that time, Kingsolver had also written a novel, The Bean Trees, while pregnant with her first child. Uncertain of its merit, she had contemplated throwing it in the bin before sending it to her agent with a note, ‘I’m sorry, you probably don’t want this. I think it’s a novel.’
Her tale of a young woman’s adventures on the road from Kentucky to Arizona became a national bestseller and over the next few years, in addition to divorcing, remarrying and playing keyboard in a rock-and-roll band that included Stephen King and Amy Tan, Barbara produced more fiction, from a collection of short stories, Homeland (1989), to The Lacuna (2010), which received the Orange Prize, and the multi-award winning Demon Copperhead.
Barbara Kingsolver now lives with her family on a farm in Virginia, where they grow their own vegetables and keep sheep. ‘As a person who makes her living at a desk,’ she says, ‘I appreciate the literal grounding of farm work. I need the physical rituals of hoeing and pulling weeds, and I love the marvel of creating new life.’
