Women’s Prize for Fiction winner: ‘Charles Dickens’s ghost helped me write it’

The book is a reimagining of Dicken’s David Copperfield, set in modern times in the Appalachian Mountains and follows a young boy who navigates foster care, labour exploitation, addiction, love and loss.

Metro spoke to Barbara after she accepted the award. She told Metro: ‘I wanted to write the great Appalachian novel. It’s a rural economically depressed region that’s really very much looked down on in the US.

‘I wanted to tell the story of how this happened to us and how resilient we are, how it’s amazing that we are still standing and the beautiful parts of our culture and community and nature.’

But Kingsolver said she didn’t know how to start the book, so while in the UK at the end of her last book tour she visited the Bleak House in Kent, which is where Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield.

‘I had this ghostly visit with him,’ Barbara said as she recounted her time at that hotel.

‘I was sitting at his desk thinking “who wants to read about orphans and poverty” and I heard him say “I do, they will” and I really truly heard him and felt his vision and I heard him say, “you have to do this and let the child tell the story”.

‘That night on that desk, on Charles Dickens’s desk, I got my notebook and started writing.

‘It’s crazy right, I don’t usually talk to dead people, like ever. It really felt like, not just permission, I really felt like he was saying “you go, girl”.’

From that night it took Barbara three years to finish the novel and at 68 she feels like she is ‘at the peak of my (her) career’.