Clare Clark
Plum Street Progress
Barbara Kingsolver has never ducked the big questions in her fiction. ‘I don’t understand how any good art could fail to be political,’ she told an interviewer in 2010 after her sixth novel, The Lacuna, scooped the Orange Prize. In 2000 she established the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, awarded to an unpublished novel that addresses issues of social justice. As well as a big cheque, the winner receives a publishing contract.
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