Garrison Keillor

Garrison Keillor is an American author, humorist, and radio personality born Gary Edward Keillor in 1942 in Anoka, Minnesota, best known as the creator and longtime host of the public-radio variety show A Prairie Home Companion and as the inventor of its fictional setting Lake Wobegon. For more than four decades he was one of the most recognised voices in American public broadcasting.

Keillor grew up in a Plymouth Brethren household and studied English at the University of Minnesota, where he began writing for student publications under the name Garrison. After graduating in 1966 he worked as a staff announcer at Minnesota Public Radio, and in 1974 he launched A Prairie Home Companion as a Saturday-evening live show modelled on the Grand Ole Opry, mixing folk and bluegrass music with comedy sketches and his own monologue The News from Lake Wobegon.

The program ran on American Public Media until 2016, with a brief hiatus in the late 1980s, and at its peak was carried by hundreds of stations to roughly four million weekly listeners. It also inspired the 2006 Robert Altman film A Prairie Home Companion, in which Keillor played a version of himself.

His books include the bestselling Lake Wobegon Days (1985), Leaving Home (1987), WLT: A Radio Romance (1991), and the column collection We Are Still Married. After leaving the show he was the subject of allegations of inappropriate behaviour in 2017 that led Minnesota Public Radio to sever ties; he has continued to write, podcast, and tour.

The name Garrison is an English surname-turned-given-name from Old French, originally meaning son of Garrett, and is masculine.