Dickens in Appalachia with Barbara Kingsolver

A conversation with Barbara Kingsolver at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 08/02/2024 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.

Barbara Kingsolver first rocketed to literary fame with her 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible. Over the past year, she has swept the global literary marketplace yet again with the release of her new novel, Demon Copperhead, a spirited retelling of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. Kingsolver draws energy from Dickens’s beloved plot and characters, but with a crucial difference: her setting is not Dickens’s London, but contemporary Appalachia–specifically, the mountains of southwest Virginia. Like Dickens’s novel before it, Demon Copperhead confronts and condemns a range of social problems. Kingsolver’s targets include the opioid crisis, the foster care system, and the economic abandonment of Appalachia. Demon Copperhead offers a vivid portrayal of rural American life, reclaiming hero status for a region that is often ignored or disparaged in American film, television, and literature.

About the speaker:
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 in her adult life 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.

Demon Copperhead was named an Oprah Book Club selection immediately upon publication, and in 2023 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Demon Copperhead also received Britain’s prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), making Kingsolver the first author in the history of the prize to receive the award twice.

Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, the nation’s largest prize for an unpublished first novel, which since 1998 has helped to establish the careers of more than a half dozen new literary voices. Through a recent agreement, the prize has now become the PEN / Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.

Since June 2004, Barbara and her family have lived on a farm in southern Appalachia, where they raise an extensive vegetable garden and Icelandic sheep.

Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.