Marilynne Robinson will soon have another award to add to her growing list of honors.
Her other awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction she won in 2005 and the National Humanities Medal that U.S. President Barack Obama awarded to her in 2012.
The Library of Congress recently announced the author and University of Iowa professor will receive the Prize for American Fiction on Sept. 24.
Robinson expressed her gratitude to the Library of Congress for the award.
“American literature has been a kind of home to me for as long as I have been aware of it. So this award could not be more gratifying,” she said.
Acting Librarian of Congress David Mao said in a press release that Robinson, who wrote the critically acclaimed novels Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, and Lila, will receive the award in Washington, D.C., during the 2016 Library of Congress Book Festival.
“With the depth and resonance of her novels, Marilynne Robinson captures the American soul,” said Mao in the press release. “We are proud to confer this prize on her and her extraordinary work.”
The Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction is given to an American author whose “body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but also for its originality of thought and imagination,” according to the library’s official press release.
The press release went on to say that the prize is given to an author who depicts “something new about the American experience.”
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Robinson became a teacher at the nationally acclaimed Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1991. She is also an F. Wendell Miller Professor of English and Creative Writing.
Makayla Steiner, a doctoral candidate and former student of Robinson’s, said she is part of the “Contemporary American Trinity” of authors, alongside Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison.
“Marilynne Robinson is noticed and given attention because she tells the truth,” Steiner said. “She’s not overly concerned about what other people think of her, and she doesn’t shift with literary fads. She just wants to know the truth of things to the extent she can, and then she shares what she thinks calmly and confidently.”
She also went on to call Robinson “the quiet whisper of conscience to American history and contemporary political and literary culture.”
Winning awards is not new for Robinson.