This year's Women's Prize for Fiction winner Barbara Kingsolver: "I want to earn my shelf space on the planet"
“I feel a little guilty, if I’m honest.” Barbara Kingsolver has just become the only woman to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction twice. Her first win was in 2010, for The Lacuna. This week, she won for her startling modern reinterpretation of David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead, a novel that has already picked up the 2023 Pulitzer Award for Fiction.
She is sitting opposite me at the Charlotte Street Hotel in London, laughingly pointing out that she was so certain she wouldn’t win that today’s roster of interviews has actually ruined a day of sightseeing in the capital for her. “What did I say when I got up there, by the way?” she suddenly asks me, of her acceptance speech. “I think I blacked out, I had nothing prepared!”
If she was surprised to win for Demon Copperhead, she was the only one who was. The prolific author’s 10th novel is a moving tour de force; a bildungsroman of the young, titular character as he grows up in rural poverty in America, moving through an unhappy childhood to foster carer through addiction and heartbreak. Whereas Dickens charted the world of poverty in Victorian England, Kingsolver directly targets the opioid crisis and the widespread, institutionalised poverty in Appalachia – where she herself lives.
“I always wanted to write the great Appalachian novel, starting with the opioid epidemic, but sort of broadening it into an examination of structural poverty in Appalachia, and I just couldn't find a way into that story that I thought would be readable,” she says. “I thought nobody wants to hear about this. And it was actually on a visit to Bleak House where Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield that I felt like I received that message that yes, people will read this, you’ve just got to do it the right way: you let the child tell the story. Right that minute I saw my Demon, I saw my David Copperfield.”
The connection between Kingsolver and Dickens now seems seamless. Both are authors preoccupied with telling stories ‘nobody wants to hear’ – examining the ills and injustices of society through carefully plotted, emotive fiction. “I think we are a natural fit, because he was writing about class and I write about class,” she agrees. “But it's interesting with the US, which purports to be a classless society, so you have to come at it from different angles. I have always loved Dickens and I think I’ve taken inspiration from how he uses characters, this humour and this kind of surrealism to talk about something as real as class, wealth and poverty and that barrier that people refuse to cross.”
One of Kingsolver’s most fertile subjects is Appalachia itself. “It is my home,” she says simply, when asked why she returns to tales set in and around rural Virginia time and time again (such as in 2000’s Prodigal Summer). This fascination is, of course, more than Kingsolver’s fidelity to the old adage ‘write what you know’ and more born from a desire to represent the region and set a course correction when it comes to views about it. When I ask if she thinks people neglect the region, she is at her most impassioned.
“Hell yes, I do!” she laughs, still unfailingly jovial and polite. “Nearly half of the people in the US do not live in cities. Yet all we see on television is cities. All of our entertainment and news is manufactured in cities. So, imagine how it feels to live in a country where you're invisible. It’s not just that they're ignoring our stories. They're ignoring us. Even my urban friends ask me how I can live in the middle of nowhere. Think about that: where we live is called nowhere.”
Kingsolver then goes on to address what we can both see coming: Trumpism. The now seminal memoir of Appalachia, Hillbilly Elegy, penned by the somewhat controversial senator J. D Vance, went some way to explaining how it was that impoverished communities came to vote for the disgraced President, and Kingsolver’s sharp and poignant novel does too.
“I completely understand the pot of rural anger boiling over so much that people are just so tired of being ignored or treated with contempt, that they will vote for the first tyrant who comes along and says, I see you, I’m going to blow up this system,” she says, sadly. “I don’t vote that way at all, but I understand it. It really worries me that that the rural urban political divide has gotten worse in the last eight years. Because, you know, the sort of the contempt has been validated. Since Trump, now people say: ‘Well, see how stupid they are, they voted for that guy.’ So, it's just it's become even harder to have a conversation across these divides.”
It is unsurprising that Kingsolver believes fiction has a powerful part to play in bridging that divide. Just as she knew the way to tell her Appalachia story was through the eyes of a young boy, so she knows the power of storytelling is in its ability to force empathy on its readers.
“A novel asks you to put your life down and enter the life of another person. So, you just go inside somebody else, and you see the world through their eyes, and their children are your children and their worries are your worries,” she says. “Fiction means you can take a tragedy or a war or whatever it is, and deliver it on a scale that really can fit inside the human heart.”
I ask her what it is that drives her to tell a story, what it is that keeps her writing. “I write about the things that worry me, the big things that I think worry a lot of people,” she reveals. “I would look at it as more a project of earning my shelf space on the planet – how can I be useful? I was raised to be useful.”
According to the judges, the Women’s Prize for Fiction was awarded to her because Demon Copperhead was a “an exposé of modern America” and a novel that “will withstand the test of time.” One would assume that Barbara Kingsolver is very useful indeed.
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