Louise Erdrich

Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and has written a linked body of novels set on and around North Dakota reservations since Love Medicine in 1984. The Night Watchman is built on her grandfather, who worked nights at a factory and led the fight against a 1953 federal policy that would have terminated the tribe's legal existence; it took a Pulitzer. The Round House won a National Book Award. She owns Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, a small shop selling Native writing. She had been married to the writer Michael Dorris and collaborated closely with him; they separated in 1995 and he died in 1997.