‘I’ve dealt with anti-hillbilly bigotry all my life’: Barbara Kingsolver on JD Vance, the real Appalachia and why Demon Copperhead was such a hit

As the Pulitzer-winning author’s little-known debut – about the 1983 Arizona miners’ strike – is published in the UK, she discusses the roots of division in the US, her wild childhood, and putting the story straight about where she’s from

When ecstatic fans tell Barbara Kingsolver they’ve read every last one of her books, she always smiles inwardly. “I bet you haven’t,” she thinks, knowing it was a nonfiction account of an Arizona miners’ strike in 1983 that set her on the road to the bestseller list.

Admittedly, this recherché volume has never been out of print in the US. But its long-term home is on the specialist list of an academic publisher, where it nestles beside other, even chewier books about labour relations. “It was hard to place,” she says. “Every editor who read it said: wow, this is interesting. But we couldn’t sell it.” Only after her first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988 did her agent send it out again, at which point an offshoot of Cornell University Press stepped in. “It’s the book nobody knows about,” she concludes, a statement only a writer who has since won just about every literary prize going could make without sounding utterly depressed (she is smiling broadly).

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