Louise Erdrich Wins Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction

Louise Erdrich

It may never have been Louise Erdrich's intention to "provide the reader a Native American experience," but she has brilliantly done exactly that for the last three decades.  And, now, she is being awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

According to the New York Times, this will happen on September 5 during the National Book Festival:

“It seems that these awards are given to a writer entirely different from the person I am — ordinary and firmly fixed,” she wrote. “Given the life I lead, it is surprising these books got written. Maybe I owe it all to my first job — hoeing sugar beets. I stare at lines of words all day and chop out the ones that suck life from the rest of the sentence. Eventually all those rows add up.”

Erdrich's first novel, Love Medicine, was published in 1984, and her most recent is 2012's The Round House.  I have been around for pretty much the entire ride (starting with her second novel, Beet Queen), and Louise Erdrich has become one of those writers in whom my trust is so high that I buy her novels on faith, fully expecting them to be of the highest quality.  And they always are.