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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Literary giant Marilynne Robinson returns for GU series

 (Associated Press)

Marilynne Robinson is one of the most esteemed American writers of our time.

It’s a simple as that. As Willow Springs, the Eastern Washington University literary magazine, noted in a 2006 article, “To consider Robinson only a creative writer is a mistake. She is a serious thinker, demanding of herself and her audience.”

She was born Marilynne Summers in Sandpoint in 1943. She spent her childhood there, and later in Coeur d’Alene, where she graduated from high school. She attended Brown University, then went on to get a doctorate in English from the University of Washington.

The 71-year-old literary luminary will return to the Inland Northwest this week for a series of talks Wednesday and Thursday sponsored by the Gonzaga University Visiting Writers Series.

Our plans for an interview fell through, due to illness on both our parts. So here are five things to know about Robinson in advance of her local appearances.

1. Robinson has published four novels. Each of them has been received with much critical acclaim. Her 2004 book, “Gilead,” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her other three novels – “Housekeeping” (1980), “Home” (2008) and “Lila” (2014) – all have been finalists for the National Book Award. Among her other prizes are the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel (“Housekeeping”), the PEN/Diamondstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay (“The Death of Adam”), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction (“Home”), the Orange Prize for fiction (“Home”) and the Ambassador Book Award (“Gilead”). She’s twice been a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, and in 2012 she won the National Humanities Medal for “grace and intelligence in writing.”

2. It was 24 years between the publication of “Housekeeping” and “Gilead.” As she told the Economist in 2008, she struggled writing that next novel because there “just wasn’t enough there.” Instead, she published essays and two books of nonfiction: “Mother Country” (1988), about contamination from a government-owned nuclear plant in England, and “The Death of Adam” (1998), subtitled “Essays on Modern Thought.”

3. The BBC recently compiled a list of the 12 best novels of the 21st century. “Gilead” is on it, at No. 4. In the accompanying write-up, author and critic Dawn Raffel argued for the book’s inclusion this way: “I can’t think of a living novelist who writes more seriously and profoundly about religious faith, which has become an almost taboo topic in contemporary literature. Robinson is both an ‘ideas’ writer and an exquisite prose stylist, investigating the big questions within the intimate space of family and community. She is also a supremely good storyteller.”

4. For a quarter-century, Robinson has balanced her job as a writer with her role as a teacher at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. As she told the Paris Review in 2008, “Teaching is a distraction and a burden, but it’s also an incredible stimulus. And a reprieve, in a way. When you’re trying to work on something and it’s not going anywhere, you can go to school and there’s a two-and-a-half-hour block of time in which you can accomplish something.”

5. “Lila” was the third of her novels set in fictional Gilead, Iowa. She told NPR last year that after she’d finished “Gilead,” she had the feeling the “characters were still with me and that there was much more that I knew about them than I had ever articulated to myself. And so I thought, ‘Well, let’s see what’s here.’ And two more books have come from that.”