Barbara Kingsolver, now 71, has built a remarkable literary career—one crowned by the Pulitzer Prize for her 2022 novel Demon Copperhead and marked by bestsellers like The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna. But buried in a recent interview is a detail that deserves far more attention than it typically receives: in the 1980s, the FBI phone-tapped and kept her under surveillance for more than four years because of her work in human rights organisations. The work was fully legal. Yet she was treated like a threat to national security.
This revelation is not particularly surprising to those who lived through that era or have studied it carefully. The FBI's COINTELPRO programme and its successors cast a wide net over activists, journalists, and ordinary citizens whose only crime was exercising their constitutional right to advocate for justice. What is striking is how casually Kingsolver mentions it now—not as the traumatic violation it surely was, but as a historical fact, something to be noted and moved past. She has made her peace with her parents in their final hours, as she mentions in the same interview. Perhaps she has similarly made peace with an overreaching government.
Yet we cannot afford to be quite so philosophical about this. Kingsolver's experience in the 1980s stands as a cautionary tale about what happens when government power goes unchecked and surveillance becomes a tool for intimidating citizens engaged in lawful dissent. Her work in human rights organisations—the very thing that triggered the FBI's attention—is exactly the kind of work democracies depend on to function. When such work becomes dangerous, when activists know they are being watched, the chill on free speech and free association becomes real and measurable.
What makes Kingsolver's mention of this particularly resonant now is her own description of what she most deplores in others: refusing to take responsibility. She can forgive anything, she says, if the offender will simply admit wrongdoing and apologize. The FBI never apologized for surveilling her. The government never acknowledged the violation. Yet here she is, decades later, still writing, still advocating—still refusing to be silenced. That resilience is admirable. But it should not be necessary.
As Kingsolver continues her work, including the 2025 founding of the Higher Ground Women's Recovery Residence in Lee County, Virginia, we would do well to remember that her ability to do so freely was hard-won and remains fragile. The same impulses that led to her surveillance in the 1980s have not disappeared. Vigilance against government overreach is not paranoia—it is the price of freedom.