Minnesota author wins big fiction award for her novel LaRose
A prolific Minnesota author – who also owns a small independent book store in Minneapolis – was awarded a top honor for her most recent novel.
Louise Erdrich won National Book Critics Circle award for fiction Thursday, for her most recent work LaRose – it tells the story of a 5-year-old's accidental death on a North Dakota reservation, and the impact on the families involved.
"I’m among such dramatically wonderful novels that it didn’t seem that this was possible," she said while accepting the award, the New York Times reports. The paper also called the fiction category this year "especially competitive."
Erdrich has written 15 novels, and has garnered honors throughout her career.
Her first work, Love Medicine, also won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction more than 30 years ago. The Round House won the National Book Award for fiction just a few years back, and The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
She's also received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, according to her bio.
She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and owns Birchbark Books and Native Arts, in Minneapolis' Lake of the Isles neighborhood.
