Louise Erdrich on her fiction: 'I'm writing out of the mixture of cultures'

Novelist Louise Erdrich was presented with the Library of Congress prize for American fiction on Saturday in recognition of her three-decade literary career.

In the Q&A at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC, that followed, Erdrich – the author of Tracks, Love Medicine and The Round House and a key voice in contemporary American literature – offered insight into the worldview from which she writes, one heavily influenced by her own experiences as a mixed-race Native American.

“It is where I’m from; literally there’s no other way than this that I can write. I’m writing out of the mixture of cultures,” she said. “Knowing both sides of my family really infused my life with a sense that I lived in many times and in many places as many people. It was never just me. I was always filled with the stories, the humor, the loss. Because, of course, we are all part of this great loss that occurred.”

She also discussed her childhood, during which she was “surrounded by library books”, and the early influence the 1955 Herman Wouk novel Marjorie Morningstar had on her love of books.

Over the past 30 years, Erdrich has authored 14 novels, many of which focus on the experiences, history, and culture of Native Americans. She has also written three collections of poetry, children’s books and a memoir. Her first novel, Love Medicine, was published in 1984, and the following year she received the Guggenheim fellowship in the creative arts. She was also awarded the lifetime achievement award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas in 2000 and the Pen/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction last year.

Erdrich was presented with the award by Library of Congress Chief of Staff Robert Newlin, who quoted the librarian of congress in noting the way her work, “connects the dream world of Ojibwe legend to the stark reality of the modern world”.

Erdrich is the third recipient of the prize in its current iteration. The American fiction prize was established in 2013 to honor distinguished writers who uniquely explore the American experience, and has been awarded to Don DeLillo (2013) and EL Doctorow (2014). Prior recipients who received the creative achievement award for fiction, established in 2009, include Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, John Grisham, and Isabel Allende. The inaugural fiction prize, the lifetime achievement award for the writing of fiction, was given to Wouk.

Bridey Heing is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. You can find more of her work here.