Norman Rush

Rush and his wife co-directed the Peace Corps in Botswana during the 1970s and 1980s, an experience that supplied the setting and much of the intellectual texture for all his major fiction, published only after he had already turned fifty.

Mating (1991), his first novel, follows an unnamed, formidably intelligent American anthropologist narrating her courtship of Nelson Denoon, a charismatic visionary who has built a utopian, women-governed development community in the Kalahari, in prose as dense with argument as with desire; it won the National Book Award in 1991.

He followed it with Mortals, a further novel set among American expatriates in Botswana, continuing to write slowly and sparingly about the same terrain of idealism, marriage, and intellectual ambition abroad.