Kingsolver won 30,000 pounds ($38,000) award at a ceremony in London. Oprah Winfrey chose “Demon Copperhead” for her book club last year. She also won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for the novel. Kingsolver, who previously won the Women’s Prize in 2010 for “The Lacuna.”
“Lightning strikes twice,” she said as she accepted the award.
Kingsolver has written social issues into her novels, which include “The Bean Trees” and “The Poisonwood Bible,” and helped establish the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.
Kingsolver beat five other Women’s Prize finalists, including Maggie O’Farrell’s Italian Renaissance tale “The Marriage Portrait” and Laline Paull’s dolphin drama “Pod.”
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Here is goodreads synopsis of Demon Copperhead:
"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.
Source: Associated Press