Prize-winning author Robinson plays down acclaim

LONDON, June 4 (Reuters) - U.S. author Marilynne Robinson has written three novels in as many decades.

Yet she has won a Pulitzer, her 1980 debut "Housekeeping" made it onto the Observer's list of 100 greatest novels, the Sunday Times called her "the world's best writer of prose" and on Wednesday she added the Orange Prize to her trophy cabinet.

"I can only hope it's true," joked Robinson, referring to the Times's pronouncement.

"It's the sort of thing that you can't take too much to heart," she added in an interview on Thursday after her third novel "Home" won the annual Orange Prize for Fiction honouring the best book in English written by a woman.

"I always suspect that there's someone in some obscure place who has five unpublished novels in a box in her closet.

"She will die and her executors will publish her novels and she will become the great spirit of the age, and all the rest of us will fall into her shadow."

The answer is typical of the soft-spoken novelist, who has avoided the limelight despite her reputation and who writes more out of necessity than a desire to reach an audience.

"Writing is such a private, solitary thing to do that when you discover that you've actually done something that is meaningful for other people, it's extremely gratifying.

"My first novel 'Housekeeping' really had quite a small readership for quite a long time and I was frankly happy with that. I'd never thought of myself as someone who could be a popular writer ... I don't really think about the readership."

PRIZES MATTER

Not that prizes don't matter.

"It sort of accelerates the phenomenon of having readers in the first place, which is always a privilege and a surprise," said Robinson, who was born in 1943 and lives in Iowa.

And an award like the Orange Prize, specifically for women, should be welcomed rather than dismissed as sexist.

"I do think it's a necessary corrective," said Robinson. "I do think that there is a lingering tendency and a culture to treat writing by women as something of a sub-category."

Home is a companion to Robinson's second novel "Gilead", published in 2004 some 24 years after Housekeeping, and features the same cast and setting but focuses on the Boughton family.

Glory returns home to care for her ailing father, a pastor. Jack, the family's wayward "prodigal son" and his father's favourite child, also arrives after a 20-year absence, and the past weighs on the story as heavily as the present.

Fi Glover, chair of the Orange Prize judges, confessed to weeping over the stately, solemn narrative.

Robinson said she felt comfortable returning to a religious family setting and weaving in Biblical references.

"I associate myself with Calvinism, which is a little bit of an exotic thing to do at this point," she said.

"One of the things that I like about the theology is the assumption that one is flawed. You never do anything exactly right, you never achieve what you aspire to.

"It seems to me as if that gives a great deal of latitude to the actual movement of emotion and mind in the course of life."

She also believed that now, when our assumptions about economic and political models are being undermined, was as good a time as any to publish fiction tackling fundamental questions.

"In this particular moment it seems to me as if really false models of reality have been proposed and have been sold and advertised and dramatised -- they've collapsed recently.

"That was fiction in the negative sense. It seems to me as if fiction itself ... is always drawing people back to a very primary experience of human being which is what the world is about after all."

(Editing by Steve Addison)