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 set among women living on the margins in Gold Rush Monterey. She farms and rides, and calls the range deliberate on the ground that repeating herself would bore her.