Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is an American writer of fiction, poetry, and works for younger readers. She is known for Love Medicine (1984), The Round House (2012), The Night Watchman (2020), and The Sentence (2021). Her major honours include the National Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Karen Louise Erdrich was born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, and grew up in North Dakota. She is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Her parents taught at a federal school in Wahpeton, and she often visited her relatives at Turtle Mountain. As a child, she wrote short stories for nickels from her father and read widely at home.

From 1972 to 1976, she studied English at Dartmouth College as part of the first group of women admitted there. During her first yea,r she met Michael Dorris, who taught in the new Native studies programme. His course led her to examine her own heritage, and she began to write poems and short stories that drew on that history. She worked as a lifeguard, a waitress, and an editor at The Circle, a newspaper of the Boston Indian Council.

In 1978, she entered the writing course at Johns Hopkins University and earned a master’s degree in 1979. She later returned to Dartmouth as a writer-in-residence. Erdrich kept in touch with Dorris, and the two began collaborating on short fiction while living in different countries. They married in 1981 and raised six children. Their later years involved family strain and public allegations before Dorris died in 1997.

Erdrich has said of her early career, “I always wrote, then at some point I realised it was the only grown-up thing I knew how to do.” Her story, "The World’s Greatest Fisherman," won the Nelson Algren Prize in 1982. She expanded it into her first novel, Love Medicine, which introduced a linked group of Ojibwe families. She went on to write The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, The Plague of Doves, The Round House, and LaRose, each set in her long fictional region of reservations and nearby towns.

The Night Watchman is based on the life of her grandfather, Patrick Gourneau and his work against the federal termination bill. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2021. Erdrich later wrote The Sentence, a novel set in a haunted bookshop during the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests after the murder of George Floyd.

Louise Erdrich lives in Minneapolis, where she owns Birchbark Books, a shop devoted to Native writing.