The Lacuna

Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955 and grew up in rural Kentucky. She earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and has worked as a freelance writer and author since 1985. At various times she has lived in England, France, and the Canary Islands, and has worked in Europe, Africa, Asia, Mexico, and South America. She spent two decades in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to southwestern Virginia where she currently resides.


Her books, in order of publication, are: The Bean Trees (1988), Homeland (1989), Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike (1989), Animal Dreams (1990), Another America (1992), Pigs in Heaven (1993), High Tide in Tucson (1995), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Prodigal Summer (2000), Small Wonder (2002), Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands, with photographer Annie Griffiths (2002), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007), The Lacuna (2009), Flight Behavior (2012), Unsheltered (2018), How To Fly (In 10,000 Easy Lessons) (2020), Demon Copperhead (2022), and coauthored with Lily Kingsolver, Coyote's Wild Home (2023). She served as editor for Best American Short Stories 2001.


Kingsolver was named one the most important writers of the 20th Century by Writers Digest, and in 2023 won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel Demon Copperhead. In 2000 she received the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the arts. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have been adopted into the core curriculum in high schools and colleges throughout the nation. Critical acclaim for her work includes multiple awards from the American Booksellers Association and the American Library Association, a James Beard award, two-time Oprah Book Club selection, and the national book award of South Africa, among others. She was awarded Britain's prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) for both Demon Copperhead and The

"Rich...impassioned...engrossing...Politics and art dominate the novel, and their overt, unapologetic connection is refreshing." - Chicago Tribune

"Masterful...a reader receives the great gift of entering not one but several worlds...The final pages haunt me still." - San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"Compelling...Kingsolver's descriptions of life in Mexico City burst with sensory detail-thick sweet breads, vividly painted walls, the lovely white feet of an unattainable love." - The New Yorker

"A work that is often close to magic.... Much research underlies this complex weaving...but the work is lofted by lyric prose." - Denver Post

"Shepherd's story in Kingsolver's accomplished literary hands is so seductive, the prose so elegant, the architecture of the novel so imaginative, it becomes hard to peel away from the book" - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"[Kingsolver's] playful pastiche brings to vivid life the culture wars of an earlier era..." - Vogue

"...True and riveting...Barbara Kingsolver has invented a wondrous filling here, sweeter and thicker than pan dulce, spicy as the hottest Mexican chiles, paranoid as the American government hunting Communists " - Philadelphia Inquirer

"A sweeping mural of sensory delights and stimulating ideas about art, government, identity and history...Readers will feel the sting of connection between then and now." - Seattle Times

"A sweeping narrative of utopian dreams and political reality...A stirring novel...intimate and pitch-perfect." - San Diego Union-Tribune

"Kingsolver deftly combines real history and the life of the fictional protagonist...A sweeping tale." - Atlanta Journal-Constitution