Robinson has written five highly acclaimed novels: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008), Lila (2014), and Jack (2020). Housekeeping was a finalist for the 1982
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (US), Gilead was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer, and Home received the 2009
Orange Prize for Fiction (UK). Home and Lila are companions to Gilead and focus on the Boughton and Ames families during the same time period.[12][13]
Robinson is also the author of many nonfiction works, including Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989), The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012), The Givenness of Things: Essays (2015), and What Are We Doing Here? (2018). Reading Genesis was released on March 12, 2024. Her novels and nonfiction works have been translated into 36 languages.
In 2009, she held a Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at
Yale University, where she delivered a series of talks titled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. In May 2011, Robinson delivered the
University of Oxford's annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters at the university's
Rothermere American Institute. On April 19, 2010, she was elected a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[18] Robinson was selected by the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University to deliver the 2018 Hulsean Lectures on Christian theology. She was the fourth woman selected for the series which was established in 1790. She has been elected a fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford and of Clare Hall, Cambridge.
The Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has acquired the papers of writer and essayist Marilynne Robinson.
Honors and awards
Robinson has received numerous literary, theological and academic honors, among them the 2006 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, the 2013
Park Kyong-ni Prize, and the 2016 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. In 2021, the Tulsa Library Trust presented her with the Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. Robinson's alma mater, the University of Washington, honored her with their 2022 Alumni Summa Laude Dignata Award.
Robinson has received honorary degrees from over a dozen universities and colleges, starting with Oxford University in 2010 and Brown University in 2012, and followed most recently by the University of Iowa, Yale University, Boston College, Cambridge University, and the University of Portland.
Commendations
The former Archbishop of Canterbury,
Rowan Williams, has described Robinson as "one of the world's most compelling English-speaking novelists", adding that "Robinson's is a voice we urgently need to attend to in both Church and society here [in the UK]."[19]
On June 26, 2015, President
Barack Obama quoted Robinson in his eulogy for
Clementa C. Pinckney of
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In speaking about "an open heart," Obama said: "[w]hat a friend of mine, the writer Marilynne Robinson, calls 'that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.'" [20] In November 2015, The New York Review of Books published a two-part conversation between Obama and Robinson, covering topics in American history and the role of faith in society.[21][22]
Personal life
Robinson was raised as a
Presbyterian and later became a
Congregationalist, worshipping and sometimes preaching at the
Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City.[23][24] Her Congregationalism and her interest in the ideas of
John Calvin have been important in many of her novels, including Gilead, which centers on the life and theological concerns of a fictional Congregationalist minister.[25] In an interview with the Church Times in 2012, Robinson said: "I think, if people actually read Calvin, rather than read
Max Weber, he would be rebranded. He is a very respectable thinker."[26]
In 1967 she married Fred Miller Robinson,[27][28] a writer and professor at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Robinsons divorced in 1989.[29] The couple had two sons. In the late 1970s, she wrote Housekeeping in the evenings while they slept. Robinson said they influenced her writing in many ways, since "[Motherhood] changes your sense of life, your sense of yourself."[30]
Robinson divides her time between northern California and upstate New York.