Elizabeth Strout’s most recent work, Olive Kitteridge, a novel in stories, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a New York Times Bestseller. She is the author of two previous novels, Abide With Me, a national bestseller, and Amy and Isabelle, also a New York Times Bestseller. (Photo by Miriam Berkley)
HONORARY DEGREE: Bates College
May 30, 2010 — Elizabeth was awarded an Honorary Degree Doctor of Letters from her alma mater, Bates College. From the Bates College website: “Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Strout, a member of the Bates class of 1977, understood even as a child that writing would loom unusually large in her life. At home, writing “was just in the air,” Strout explained in an August 2009 Washington Post article, and her mother urged her to write down what she saw.
From this early introduction to the literary life, Strout has developed a career distinguished by three full-length fiction works (all published by Random House) nationally acclaimed for their power to conjure up captivating characters with complex emotional lives. 1998’s Amy and Isabelle won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and a Los Angeles Times award for a fiction debut, and was made into a movie for ABC television in 2001. Abide with Me (2006), the story of a small-town clergyman’s fall and redemption, was a national best seller and Book Sense pick. Olive Kitteridge, a “novel-in-stories,” won the 2009 Pulitzer for fiction and became a New York Times Best Seller.
All these works are set in Maine. Strout was born in Portland and spent much of her youth in Maine, a state that means “just about everything” to her, as she told Bates Magazine in 2006. Majoring in English at Bates, Strout earned her first fiction byline in 1982 and since then has published short stories in The New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine and various literary journals.
While paying her dues as a writer, Strout worked a variety of jobs including waitress, mattress salesperson and nightclub pianist. She holds a law degree from Syracuse University and teaches in a low-residency writing program at Queens University, Charlotte, N.C. She lives in New York City.”