Marilynne Robinson: Guest Speaker at TRO Reading for Wellbeing Conference

Everyone at The Reader Organisation is looking forward to Marilynne Robinson's appearance at our Reading for Wellbeing Conference next Tuesday (17th May).

Marilynne is an American award-winning novelist, picking up the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Gilead and the Orange Prize for Fiction for her 2008 work Home.

Gilead was Marilynne's second novel, coming some 24 years after her first - Housekeeping. She has also written non-fiction about various topics including Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria in Mother Country and an investigation into the use of science by crusading atheists in Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self .

As you may expect from a prize-winning author, Marilynne has always been a keen reader, as the following extract from a 2009 interview with The Guardian illustrates:

Robinson made her first attempt at Moby-Dick at the age of nine - people mocked her for carting it around and she finished it to spite them - and then "read my way down the shelf in the library".

Marilynne has a fan in the form of US President Barack Obama, who lists Gilead amongst his favourite books on his Facebook page. This sits alongside Moby Dick by Herman Melville, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln and Self-Reliance by highly-regarded philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the aforementioned interview with The Guardian Marilynne indicated that she was in turn, inspired by the orations of Obama:

On a shelf in Robinson's living room is a large framed poster of a quote by President Obama: "For as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible."

Marilynne will be joined as a guest speaker by Professor Maryanne Wolf, more information about the conference is available here.