In 1994, Kingsolver was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from her alma mater, DePauw University. After returning to the US in 1992, she separated from her husband. She moved with her daughter to Tenerife in the Canary Islands for a year during the first Gulf war, mostly due to frustration over America's military involvement. In 1985 she married Joseph Hoffmann their daughter Camille was born in 1987. She began her career in fiction writing after winning a short story contest in a local Phoenix newspaper. Kingsolver began her full-time writing career in the mid 1980s as a science writer for the university, which eventually lead to some freelance feature writing. In 1980 she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Arizona, where she earned a Master's degree in ecology and evolutionary biology. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1977, and moved to France for a year before settling in Tucson, Arizona, where she would live for much of the next two decades. Eventually, however, she changed her major to biology when she realized that 'classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of get to play 'Blue Moon' in a hotel lobby.' She was involved in activism on her campus, and took part in protests against the Vietnam war. Her parents worked in a public health capacity, and the family lived without electricity or running water.Īfter graduating from high school, Kingsolver attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana on a music scholarship, studying classical piano.

When Kingsolver was seven years old, her father, a physician, took the family to the former Republic of Congo in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland in 1955 and grew up in Carlisle in rural Kentucky.

In 2000, Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize to support 'literature of social change.' She has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Kingsolver has received numerous awards, including the UK's Orange Prize for Fiction 2010, for The Lacuna and the National Humanities Medal. Each of her books published since 1993 have been on The New York Times Best Seller list. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments. Her most famous works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a non-fiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. Kingsolver earned degrees in Biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in Africa in her early childhood. Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist, and poet.

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