Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky, the daughter of a country doctor, and studied biology before turning to fiction; she has spent decades writing novels that fuse ecological and social conscience, largely from a farm in southwestern Virginia's Appalachian foothills.

Demon Copperhead (2022) transplants the plot of Dickens's David Copperfield into contemporary Appalachia, narrated by a wisecracking, orphaned foster child navigating poverty, the opioid epidemic, and a child-welfare system that fails him at nearly every turn; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023, shared with Hernán Diaz's Trust.

Her earlier novels, including The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, established her as one of American fiction's most consistently socially engaged writers, and Demon Copperhead became her second-biggest bestseller and a rare late-career Pulitzer for a novelist already deep into a long, celebrated run.