In conversation with Barbara Kingsolver, author of Demon Copperhead

We meet American writer Barbara Kingsolver under a sheltering tree at Alipore Museum (formerly a jail built by the British where many of India’s political prisoners, including Jawaharlal Nehru, were incarcerated) in Kolkata. As birds chirp and leaves sway in the gentle breeze, she approves of the setting. 

In the city for the Kolkata Literary Meet, Kingsolver takes in some of the sights — the Botanical Gardens and the largest flower market in Asia near Howrah Bridge and the ghats — to get a sense of the place. A biologist by training and writer by profession, she has always had her ear to the ground and her books reflect that.

She sensitively recast Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield into Demon Copperhead (2022), in which an Appalachian boy narrates his life amid a raging opioid crisis. Like in all her novels, the story’s large problems — poverty, addiction, failure of institutions — are universal themes, and struck a chord with readers. As did Demon’s intrinsic values, “gentle optimism, resilience and determination”, with which he faces his challenges.

Accolades followed swiftly — the Pulitzer Prize, Women’s Prize for Fiction, months on The New York Times bestseller list, and book tours taking her far away from southern Appalachia where she lives on a farm.

Seen and heard stories

Kingsolver had been thinking about how to tell the story of the opioid crisis — “people don’t want to read about orphans and poverty” — when the Eureka moment came during a stay at Bleak House in Kent, where Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield. “In Dickens’ office, with his manuscripts and pens lying around, I felt his spirit come to me and say, ‘Look around, David Copperfield was a huge hit, so was Oliver Twist. You have to let the child tell the story’,” recalls Kingsolver.

She immediately began writing in her notebook on Dickens’ desk, taking David Copperfield as a first draft, with its “great plot and fabulous characters”. Transplanting it to her place (Appalachia) and time (the present), she gave her David “a new name, red hair, fierce attitude” and made him “less apologetic, resilient, and such a survivor”. “Everybody loves a survivor story and Dickens was my way in, he opened the door,” she says.

Kingsolver’s first book was a work of non-fiction, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983, but she struggled to find a publisher till her debut novel, The Bean Trees (1988), was out. During the mine strike, she was working as a journalist and sending despatches, but the protesting women touched something in her that she has never lost. “I realised that there are people who need so much to be seen, to have their stories heard, especially people who are dealing with stereotypes.”

Why bad things must happen

In her novels, Kingsolver has written about the “ruthlessness of capitalism and imperialism” (The Poisonwood Bible, 1998); a happy marriage (The Lacuna, 2009); how people behave when their world is falling apart (Unsheltered, 2018). Her stories deal with values like compassion and empathy, respecting difference, and acknowledging some of the terrible things that have been done in the name of progress. The common thread is an attempt to “cultivate connections” which is the “first responsibility in these divisive times. Right now in my country, we have a civil war”.

In that, the role of literature cannot be highlighted enough, notes Kingsolver. “Reading literature strengthens compassion. When you read fiction, you leave our own life behind and become another person, and you see the world through another point of view. By experiencing that person’s reality and then coming back to yourself, you have changed; you have expanded your heart, and through that process we can change the world.”

Asked if she is working on a new book, she quips: “I have such a good answer for that.” Yes, a new novel, Partita, is expected this October. “It has a musical form; the protagonist is a musician. It’s one woman’s story which takes place in two phases of her life, in which she endures some catastrophes. After all, if nothing bad happens, it’s not a good story, there’s no conflict. I have these bad things happen to my characters, so that I can make them come back.”

Besides being a writer, Kingsolver is also a pianist. But a chronic disorder, Dupuytren’s disease, contracts her hands into fists and every few years, she needs surgery to straighten her hands. “My surgeon has done a very good job, so I can type and I can play the piano. But gripping anything for long advances the disease, and so I had to stop signing books.” It was very hard for her but as she tells her readers, “If you let me keep my hands, I will keep writing books.”

sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in

Published – February 06, 2026 06:15 am IST