Barbara Kingsolver

In 1994, she married Steven Hopp, an ornithologist. They were blessed with a daughter, Lily, in 1996.

In 2000, she established the ‘Bellwether Prize for Fiction’ to honor extraordinary writers whose unpublished works promote positive social change. The award includes guaranteed major publication and a cash prize of US $25,000, fully funded by her.

She was born on April 8, 1955 in Annapolis, Maryland, to Wendell R. Kingsolver, a physician, and his wife, Virginia, a homemaker. She spent most of her childhood in the rural areas of eastern Kentucky.

When she was seven, her family moved to Congo Léopoldville (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Her parents worked at a public health capacity and used to live without electricity or running water.

After completing high school, she attended college in the DePauw University, Indiana, on a musical scholarship though she later switched to science. She became involved in social activism in college and protested against the Vietnam War. In 1977, she graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in science, majoring in biology.

After graduating, she traveled to France for a year and finally settled in Arizona. In 1980, she got enrolled at the University of Arizona and earned her master’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology.

Initially, she tried working at numerous jobs such as a copy editor, archaeologist, x-ray technician, housekeeper, biological researcher and translator of medical documents.

Subsequently, her writing career began when she started working on the University of Arizona’s journal, as a science writer. Along with it, she also did some freelance feature writing for the local alternative weekly, the ‘Tucson Weekly’.

From 1985 to 1987, she worked as a freelance writer. Her first fiction novel ‘The Bean Trees’ was published in 1988 which received critical as well as commercial acclaim.

In 1989, she wrote a non-fiction work titled ‘Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983’. In subsequent years, she published her short story collection ‘Homeland and Other Stories’ (1989), and the novels ‘Animal Dreams’ (1990) and ‘Pigs in Heaven’ (1993).

In 1992, she published a collection of poetry titled ‘Another America/Otra America. She published her bestseller ‘High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now and Never’ in 1995.

In 1998, she published her most critically acclaimed novel ‘The Poisonwood Bible’, a story about an Evangelical Christian family on a mission in Africa. The novel became a best-seller and is considered her best-known work.