Furman University

Marilynne Robinson

GREENVILLE, S.C.—Professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson will speak at Furman University Sunday, Oct. 9 at 3 p.m. in Shaw Hall of Younts Conference Center.

Her talk, “Nature and Human Nature,” is part of Furman’s Charles H. Townes lecture series on faith and reason. The program is free and open to the public.

Robinson teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ workshop. She is author of Gilead, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Her most recent novel, Home, a companion to Gilead, won the 2008 L.A. Times Book Prize for fiction and the 2009 Orange Prize for fiction.

Robinson is also author of the modern classic Housekeeping, which won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award for First Fiction and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the Academy of American Arts and Letters.  It was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Robinson received a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award in 1990 and the prestigious Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts in 1998. She is also author of four nonfiction books, Mother Country, The Death of Adam, Absence of Mind, and the forthcoming When I Was a Child I Read Books.

The Townes lecture series is named in honor of Charles H. Townes, a 1935 Furman graduate who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1964 for his contributions to the development of the maser and laser.

For more information about the event, contact Furman’s News and Media Relations office at 864-294-3107.