‘Guilty!” American novelist Barbara Kingsolver says when I ask how she feels to become the first writer to win the Women’s prize for fiction twice. “Guilty and delighted,” she says over coffee in a London hotel, the morning after winning the prize for her tenth novel Demon Copperhead. “I don’t want to be greedy. I don’t want to take something that would be more helpful to someone else. It’s my upbringing, I was raised in a culture of modesty.”
With a Susan-Sontag silver streak in her hair and steely good humour, 68-year-old Kingsolver is a quiet titan of American literature. Best-known for her mega-selling 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna, which won the Women’s (then Orange) prize in 2010, she has taken on uncomfortable subjects such as American colonialism and climate change. She counts Hillary Clinton as a friend and was invited to lunch at the White House with Barack Obama – “One of the most magnetically attractive human beings” – who quizzed her for writing tips. And yet, she rarely leaves the farm in the mountains of south-west Virginia, where she lives with her husband. When she is not writing, she turns her hand to delivering breach lambs. “I’ve done things that risk my wedding band, I’ll just put it like that,” she says, laughing.
