“Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view.”

American novelist and essayist

Marilynne Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. She has written across several decades and is widely known for her fiction and nonfiction. Her work has earned major recognition, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, the National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2016. Robinson taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop from 1991 until her retirement in spring 2016. In 2016, Time included her on its list of the 100 most influential people. Her writing has been recognized for its literary seriousness and for the range of ideas it addresses.