Born in Minnesota, author of numerous novels, poems, short stories, children’s books, Louise Erdrich is universally considered one of the most significant contemporary American writers. The characters and environments of her works are predominantly Native Americans. In 2009 her novel The Plague of Doves was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and she received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. With the novel The Round House Erdrich was awarded one of the most important and coveted American awards, the National Book Award 2012. In Italy some of her books have been published, such as Love Medicine, Birchbark house and Shadow Tag, a novel which met with great critical and public acclaim in the United States, selling more than sixty thousand copies in just a few months. She owns Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore in Minneapolis which focuses on literature of Native Americans and the Native community in the Twin Cities.