A novelist, a short-story writer and an essayist, Marilynne Robinson currently teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel to critical and popular acclaim. Subsequently, she published various essay collections that include Mother Country (1989) and The Death of Adam (1998). The highly praised Gilead (published in Italy by Einaudi, 2008) won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2009 she was awarded the Orange Prize for her novel Home, published in Italy by Einaudi in 2011. She is one of the strongest and deepest voices of the world’s fiction and in her stories she is able to describe the intimacy and the spirituality of unforgettable characters in an exquisite way. Her short stories and essays have been published on numerous magazines, such as Harper’s, The Paris Review and The New York Times Book Review. She has been visiting professor at many American universities and in 2013 she was bestowed the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.

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For reasons beyond the control of Le Conversazioni, Marilynne Robinson was unable to attend the reading on June 27, 2014. Diego De Silva and Gaetano Cappelli discussed the theme of "corruption and purity" as well as the text written by Marilynne Robinson for Le Conversazioni.