She attended Pembroke College, the former women’s college at Brown University, receiving her B.A., magna cum laude in 1966, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington in 1977.

Robinson has written three highly acclaimed novels: Housekeeping which won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel , the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Ambassador Book Award and the 2006 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion and was nominated for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; Gilead which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and Home which won the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009.

She has been writer-in-residence or visiting professor at many universities, including the University of Kent, Amherst, and the University of Massachusetts’ MFA Programme for Poets & Writers. In 2009, she held a Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale University and in April 2010 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She currently teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Marilynne Robinson lives in Iowa City, USA.