December 5, 2005 == MEDIA ADVISORY
Marilynne Robinson, an author slated to appear at the April 20-22, 2006
Festival of Faith & Writing at Calvin College, has been honored with the
prestigious Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion.
Robinson will join Salman Rushdie and Walter Wangerin Jr. as keynote speakers
at the 2006 Festival.
The Grawemeyer Award for her book "Gilead" (which also won the 2005 Pulitzer
Prize for Fiction) marks the first time a novel has won the Grawemeyer religion
prize, which is given jointly by Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
and the University of Louisville.
The book is written as a 1950s diary by a third-generation Congregationalist
minister in the small town of Gilead, Iowa. It has been called "profoundly
theological but never preachy."
The novel by Robinson, who lives in Iowa City and teaches at the University of
Iowa, was selected from among 53 nominations. Last year's award went to
former Calvin professor (and current University of Notre Dame professor) George
M. Marsden for his biography of colonial preacher and theologian Jonathan
Edwards.
Besides winning the Pulitzer Prize and the Grawemeyer Award, "Gilead" also has
received the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was named among the top ten
books of the year by the New York Times, Newsweek, Washington Post, San
Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Christian
Science Monitor and amazon.com.
The 2006 Festival of Faith & Writing will bring together more than 50 writers
and some 2,000 conference participants from around the continent who gather for
three days to soak in the Festival's wealth of keynote addresses, seminars,
workshops and more.
In addition to Robinson, Rushdie and Wangerin, the 2006 Festival will feature
many other notable writers, including fiction and non-fiction writers,
journalists and songwriters as well as a variety of representatives from the
publishing world.
See http://www.grawemeyer.org/religion/index.html
Also see http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2005_06/festival.htm
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Received on Mon Dec 5 09:54:01 2005
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