Louise Erdrich is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, poet, and member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. She has written 28 books across fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and children's literature, and often focuses on the “Indigerati,” her name for urban, intellectual Native Americans of the Upper Midwest.
Erdrich was born the oldest of seven children to a German-American father and a Chippewa mother. As a child, her father paid her a nickel for every story she wrote. She attended Dartmouth College as part of its first co-ed class and earned her Bachelor of Arts in English. She then earned her Master of Arts in the Writing Seminars in 1979 from Johns Hopkins University.
In 1979, Erdrich wrote the short story "The World's Greatest Fisherman,” which won her the 1982 Nelson Algren fiction prize and became the basis for her first novel, Love Medicine. This work would begin the tetralogy that includes The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace. These novels employ multiple narrators to explore the lives of Indian families living on or near a North Dakota Ojibwa reservation and the white people they encounter. Love Medicine won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Erdrich then released Tales of Burning Love and The Antelope Wife, which detail tumultuous relationships and their fallout, and later The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, about a woman who steals a priest’s identity to assume his position on a reservation.
Erdrich stepped away from Native American themes with The Master Butchers Singing Club. Later novels include The Plague of Doves, Shadow Tag, the National Book Award-winning The Round House, and LaRose. She then headed off in a dystopian direction with the novel Future Home of the Living God. In 2020, she released The Night Watchman, which won her the Pulitzer Prize and was inspired by her activist grandfather. Most recently, she has authored The Sentence, which incorporates the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd into the story of a haunted bookstore.
Erdrich is also the owner of an independent bookstore in Minneapolis called Birchbark Books, which specializes in Native American literature and the Native community.