Marilynne Robinson, the F. Wendell Miller Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop of the University of Iowa, has been named to receive the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. The award is given to writers “whose body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but also for its originality of thought and imagination.” Professor Robinson will be honored at the Library of Congress in Washington on September 24.
A year ago, Professor Robinson won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the fiction category for her novel Lila (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014). The novel is third book in a series about a family in small town Iowa. The first book in the series Gilead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004), won the Pulitzer Prize.
Professor Robinson is a native of Idaho. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Brown University and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington. She has served on the faculty at the University of Iowa since 1991.