Barbara Kingsolver discusses FBI surveillance, love and new novel 'Partita'

11h

Summary

Novelist Barbara Kingsolver, 71, gave an interview about her life, career and latest novel 'Partita'.
Kingsolver says the FBI phone-tapped her for more than four years in the 1980s over her legal human rights work.
Her 2022 novel 'Demon Copperhead' won the Pulitzer prize, the James Tait Black prize and the Women's prize for fiction.
In 2025 she founded the Higher Ground Women's Recovery Residence in Lee County, Virginia, where 'Demon Copperhead' is set.
Born in Maryland, she won a music scholarship to DePauw University, became a journalist and published 'The Bean Trees' in 1988.
She lives in Virginia with her second husband, has two children, and calls her earliest memory teaching herself to read at three.

Kingsolver says the trait she most deplores in others is refusing to take responsibility.
Kingsolver says she can forgive anything if the offender admits it and apologises.
Kingsolver says love feels like breaking the speed limit at 16 and, years later, like a warm bath.
Kingsolver says the living person she most despises is one a growing majority of her compatriots would like never to see on their news feeds again.

Barbara Kingsolver: ‘What does love feel like? At 16, breaking the speed limit. Years later, a warm bath’theguardian.com· 11h
Rosanna Greenstreet interviews novelist Barbara Kingsolver for the Guardian, where the 71-year-old author of Demon Copperhead describes love as breaking the speed limit at 16 and later a warm bath. Among her answers: she taught herself to read at three, and the FBI phone-tapped her for over four years in the 1980s over her legal human rights work.