Marilynne Robinson, The Southbank Centre

If you haven’t read Marilynne Robinson already, please do. It only takes a short while to read her entire oeuvre, but her richly beautiful prose is powerfully affective. She first turned heads with her novel Housekeeping in 1981, and was immediately considered a literary great, though she did not publish another novel for 20 years. Since then she has become a Pulitzer and Orange prize winner. Now she comes to talk at the Southbank Centre after the upcoming publication of her fourth novel Lila in October. 
Robinson also writes non-fiction and is known for arguing that positivism - the Dawkins style worldview that the means to truth is only through the scientific - is highly reductive of humanity and does not leave any space for all the other kinds of spiritual truths that can’t be proved in a laboratory.
Her writing reflects this: by weaving past and present together through precise and sensory detail, she imbues every moment with metaphorical significance, which takes on a quality of the numinous. These many layered novels contain volumes more than their small page counts.
Robinson is an intensely deep thinker, and is also a wonderful speaker. Expect to be touched by her graciousness and purity of heart.