Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of American novelists. Born in 1954 in Minnesota, she grew up mostly in North Dakota, where her parents taught at Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. She is the author of numerous novels, the first of which, Love Medicine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the most recent of which, The Round House, won the National Book Award for Fiction 2012. She lives in Minnesota with her children, who help her run a small independent bookstore called The Birchbark.