Jane Smiley

A Thousand Acres moves King Lear to an Iowa farm, hands the story to the daughters, and supplies a reason for their behaviour that Shakespeare never offers; it won the Pulitzer in 1992. Smiley has also written a comic campus novel, a medieval Greenland saga, thirteen books for children about horses, and a trilogy covering a hundred years of one Iowa family at a chapter a year. Perestroika in Paris follows a racehorse who gets loose and lives in the city with a dog, a raven and a rat. A Dangerous Business is a murder mystery among sex workers in Gold Rush Monterey. She farms and rides, and calls the range deliberate on the ground that repeating herself would bore her.