Kathryn Stockett

Kathryn Stockett is an American novelist best known for fiction about women, race, class and social inequality in the American South. Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, she graduated from the University of Alabama before moving to New York, where she worked in magazine publishing and marketing for nine years. Her debut novel, The Help, became an international bestseller, selling more than fifteen million copies, and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. Stockett’s fiction uses multiple female viewpoints, humour and domestic relationships to examine communities governed by rigid social conventions.

Her historical novel The Help is set in Jackson in 1962, during the developing civil-rights movement. It follows Black domestic workers Aibileen and Minny and aspiring white writer Skeeter as they secretly record the experiences of maids employed by white families, exposing racism, economic dependence and the dangers of challenging segregation. The Calamity Club moves back to Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933, where the Great Depression and the waning years of Prohibition form the background to the intertwined lives of an orphaned girl and several socially marginalised women. Both novels focus on female friendship and resistance, while portraying women attempting to secure dignity and independence within the racial, economic and gender hierarchies of the historical South.