Marilynne Robinson is an American novelist and essayist born on November 26, 1943, in Sandpoint, Idaho. Over her writing career, she has received numerous major awards, 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. In 2016, she was named to Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began her teaching career at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991, where she worked for over two decades before retiring in the spring of 2016.