Marilynne Robinson is the author of four exquisite novels and five nonfiction works collecting lectures and essays previously
published in such eminent journals of ideas as The New York Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation,
Harper�s, and The Christian Century. The essays are earnest, learned, knotted, and closely reasoned, springing from Robinson�s
deeply considered, radically democratic Calvinism. They read like a cross between humanist homiletics and sharp cultural
criticism. To read them is to feel the author�s mind wrestling with the big questions � Grace, Fear, Being � as Jacob wrestled
with the angel.
The novels, like most of the essays, have one-word titles � Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, and Lila � as though they too name the
questions they will take up. But these questions have a more human scale than those of the essays and, as befits novels,
pose the questions in terms of personal relationships. Her characters traverse the vast interpersonal spaces between belonging
and alienation, most without ever leaving town. Each novel follows a small group of people, the last three centering on
essentially the same community of people living in mid-twentieth-century middle-America, and the action is for the most part
small: a prodigal returns; an elderly dying man contemplates his life and writes a letter to his son; a homeless young woman
finds a home; a young woman leaves home and finds her true family. But the issues are big: the wages of America�s original
sin of slavery; the care and keeping of the environment; the debt owed our children and their children; the burdens and blessings
of reconciliation.
On one level Robinson�s fiction itemizes homely local virtues, the sort we have in mind when we speak nostalgically of small-town
America or imagine a more innocent, happier past time. But on another level Robinson invites us to contemplate how a virtuous
patina permits us to mask our darker selves. Thus the good people of Gilead, the setting for her most recent three novels, hearken
back to their town�s abolitionist past but in their present engage in or simply accept the sort of petty acts of passive and
not-so-passive racism and sexism that can drive a black or mixed-race family or a single mother from their town. Kindness to
neighbors is as good a thing in Robinson�s fictional world as it is on the road to Jericho or on the journey of life. But, she
reminds us, only when we grasp the difficult concept that �neighbor� describes all our fellow travelers do we even begin to
approach the ideal Good. The novels offer both rebuke and counsel, without being didactic: they are, in fact, full of sensuous
pleasures in characterization, description, mood, and voice.
Late in 2015, Marilynne Robinson sat down for a lengthy chat with one of her biggest fans, President Barack Obama. Published
in two parts in The New York Review of Books, the conversation ranged far and wide, but touched again and again on a deceptively
simple shared principle. As Robinson put it, �the basis of democracy is the willingness to assume well about other people. You
have to assume that basically people want to do the right thing.� Graceful and accomplished, ethical and humane, Robinson�s
writing has for over thirty years reminded, encouraged, pushed, and sometimes prodded readers to do that right thing and, in
the process, to become reacquainted with what another U.S. President (who would surely also have admired her work) called
�the better angels of our nature.�
Carol S. Loranger
Chair, Department of English Language and literatures
College of Liberal Arts
Faculty President
Wright State University
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2016 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award
(Click photo to see acceptance speech at awards dinner.)
Marilynne Robinson
"I have had the privilege of seeing for myself how books live in the world, how readily they
can cross all sorts of borders and boundaries, how important they are in sustaining a human
conversation through and despite the frictions that arise among nations, how intensely they
can be taken to heart anywhere. It is certainly appropriate that a literary prize should also
be a peace prize, and that writers themselves should be made aware of their unique opportunity
to speak to an international readership, an opportunity created by the interest and quality
and commitment to truth of the literary work of generations."
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Marilynne Robinson is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for
�her grace and intelligence in writing.� She is the author of Lila, a finalist for the National Book Award and
the National Book Critics Circle Award, Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National
Book Critics Circle Award, and Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a
finalist for the National Book Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.
Robinson�s nonfiction books include The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind,
The Death of Adam, and Mother Country, which was nominated for a National Book Award. She teaches at the
University of Iowa Writers� Workshop and lives in Iowa City.
==> Read the full press release
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