Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout is an American novelist born in Portland, Maine, in 1956. She writes literary fiction, often placing ordinary people from small New England towns at the center of her stories, and she has become one of the most recognized voices in contemporary American fiction.

She grew up in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire, in a household of teachers: her father taught science and her mother taught English at a high school. After graduating from Bates College she spent a year in Oxford, England, and then studied law, earning her law degree at Syracuse University in 1982. That same year her first short story appeared in the magazine New Letters. For years she combined writing stories, which appeared in literary magazines and in publications such as Redbook and Seventeen, with teaching and other jobs. Her first novel, Amy and Isabelle (1998), took six or seven years to finish. It was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was later adapted for television.

Her work is marked by close attention to everyday life, family bonds and the hurts people carry quietly. Many of her books are built from linked stories. Olive Kitteridge (2008), a collection about a woman, her family and her neighbors on the coast of Maine, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009 and was adapted into a miniseries for HBO. My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), about a woman recovering from surgery who reconnects with her estranged mother, brought her international acclaim. Lucy returns in later novels, and Olive Kitteridge was followed by Olive, Again (2019).

Her legacy lies in giving quiet dignity to ordinary lives and in showing the continued power of the linked story cycle. She has also taught creative writing at Colgate University and has been part of the faculty of the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte.