Louise Erdrich

Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, the daughter of a German-American father and an Ojibwe mother whose family belonged to the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa; her maternal grandfather served as tribal chairman. She was among the first women admitted to Dartmouth, where she met the anthropologist Michael Dorris, whom she married and with whom she collaborated closely on her early fiction.

Love Medicine, published in 1984, launched a cycle of interlinked novels returning again and again to the same fictional North Dakota reservation and its families across generations. Her marriage to Dorris ended amid allegations of abuse shortly before his suicide in 1997, a rupture she rarely discusses publicly.

She has continued the reservation cycle across dozens of books, won the National Book Award for The Round House, and runs Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore in Minneapolis specializing in Native writing.