Marilynne Robinson to give Frances Steloff Lecture Oct. 29

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson will deliver the annual Frances Steloff lecture and reading at Skidmore College on Friday, Oct. 29.  Free and open to the public, the event will begin at 8 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. Robinson will receive an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Skidmore President Philip Glotzbach at a brief ceremony opening the event. 

Robinson will lecture on "The Writer In Society" and then read from a work of fiction before taking audience questions.

Robinson has taught fiction writing for 23 years at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore and will return to teach again in July 2011. She is a regular columnist for the Skidmore College quarterly magazine Salmagundi. During the academic year she teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

She is best known as the author of several award-winning novels, including Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home. She has also won major literary prizes for her books of non-fiction, which include Mother Country, The Death of Adam, and the recent Absence of Mind (a series of papers delivered in 2009 as The Terry Lectures at Yale University).

Robinson's first novel Housekeeping won the PEN/ Hemingway Award in 1980 and was hailed as "an American classic" by novelists as diverse as Walker Percy and Doris Lessing. "This is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight," Lessing wrote. A reviewer for The New York Times Book Review wrote of the book: "So precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to miss any pleasure it might yield."

Robinson's second novel Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 and was an improbable New York Times best seller for several months. Lisa Shea wrote of it in Elle: " Gilead is an inspired work from a writer whose sensibility seems stepped in holy fire." In Slate, Anne Hulbert wrote, "You must read this book?Altogether unlike any other work of fiction, it has sprung forth more than 20 years after Housekeeping with what I can only call amazing grace."

Robinson's third novel Home won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Orange Prize in fiction when it appeared two years ago. In the New York Review of Books Claire Messud wrote, "Remarkable - an even stronger accomplishment than Gilead." And A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times Book Review: "Home is an anguished pastoral, a tableau of decency and compassion that is also an angry and devastating indictment of moral cowardice and unrepentant sin."

The 2010 Steloff Lecture is the 39th in a series that has brought to Skidmore Nobel Prize winners like Mario Vargas Llosa, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, J.M. Coetzee and Saul Bellow, as well as other major writers like Katherine Anne Porter, Arthur Miller, Margaret Atwood, Louise Gluck, Don DeLillo, John Banville and Joyce Carol Oates. S kidmore's annual Steloff Lecture was established in 1967 by Frances Steloff, a native of Saratoga Springs who became a well-known patron of writers and founded the Gotham Book Mart in New York City.  She endowed the lecture series as a way to bring outstanding literary and artistic talent to the college.