The Pulitzer winner on life’s big issues: science,religion and discussing democracy with Barack ObamaMarilynne Robinson is the author of four novels, Housekeeping, and Gilead,which won a Pulitzer, Home, and which won the Orange prize,and Lila. One of her legions of fans is Barack Obama, who visited her recently in Iowa, and where she lives and teaches. Famously dedicated to her work,she once told an interviewer that “switching off” was her version of George Orwell’s Room 101. This conversation was frequently punctuated by Robinson’s rich, deep laughter.
The current York Review of Books’s transcript of your assembly with Barack Obama revealed an extraordinarily wide-ranging discussion. How was that experience for you?
Well, and you know,it was wonderful. I mean, it’s not the sort of thing one expects. The president is a very, and very mental man with a very strong literary interest. And I mediate that he sort of felt like having the kind of conversation that he would like to have,rather than one that is always dictated by the politics of the moment or world circumstances. He was in Des Moines for this speech that he gave approximately education reform, and since I was here, and he just added me into the itinerary,and I was very pleased.
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Source: theguardian.com