GAMBIER — The Kenyon Review held its annual Kenyon Review Literary Festival last week, with four days of activities running Wednesday through Saturday. The festival offered such varied events as seminars, workshops discussions, a dinner to aid Food for the Hungry, demonstrations and lectures.

The capstone to the festival was the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture: An Evening with Louise Erdrich, followed by a book signing and reception.

Erdrich is the recipient of the Kenyon Review’s Award for Literary Achievment for 2009. Presented at a benefit dinner each year in New York City, the prize honors careers of extraordinary literary achievement, recognizing writers whose influence and importance have shaped the American literary landscape.

Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minn., daughter of a Chippawa mother and a German-American father. She was raised in Wahpeton, N.D., where her parents were teachers at the Bureau of Indian Affairs school.

She attended Dartmouth College, where she was part of the first class of women in 1972. That was also the year Dartmouth created the Native American studies department. Erdrich graduated in 1976 and went on to earn her M.A. in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in 1979.

She published a book of poems, “Jacklight,” in 1984. Her first novel, “Love Medicine,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award also in 1984.

Her most recent novel “The Plague of Doves” was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize and New York Times bestseller. She read excerpts from “Plague of Doves” and “Love Medicine.”

Her most recent novel is set in Pluto North Dakota. It follows the repercussions of the unsolved murder of a farm family in 1911 echo through the life of every character in Pluto. The characters are all vividly described and came alive during her reading.

“Love Medicine” is about the Chippewa (aka Ojibwa) living on a fictional reservation in North Dakota and how one person’s death affects many people’s lives. The book is made up of a disjointed but interconnected series of short narratives told from the perspective of a different character, and moving backward and forward in time between the 1930s and the present day, the book told the stories of several families living near each other on a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation.

After the reading, Erdrich answered a few questions from the audience and then signed her books for the audience.