Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson was born in 1943. Her first novel, "Housekeeping" (1981), hailed as one of the greatest novels of all time by the "Observer," received the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her second work, "Gilead," published twenty-four years later, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2009, she was again a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her third novel, "Home," which had already been awarded the Orange Prize, the most prestigious literary award for an English-speaking female author. Robinson is considered a living legend of contemporary American literature. In 2009, she delivered a series of lectures at Yale University that sparked significant discussion and debate, titled "Absence of Mind: The Modern Myth of the Self and the Dispersion of Its Inner Substance."