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)
ONLINE CHAT: Readerville Forum
May 28, 2009 – In the last online chat offered by Readerville.com before it suspended operations, Karen Templar discusses Olive Kitteridge with Elizabeth.
EXCERPT:
Our guest this week is Elizabeth Strout, who recently won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Olive Kitteridge. The collection of 13 short stories set in small-town Maine and bound together by Olive, the title character, was cited by the Pulitzer jury as “blunt, flawed and fascinating.” The New Yorker said about the book: “Strout animates the ordinary with astonishing force. … [She] makes us experience not only the terrors of change but also the terrifying hope that change can bring: she plunges us into these churning waters and we come up gasping for air.” This book also received the high honor of being tied for first place in the annual list of Best Books Read in 2008 by the Readerville community.
Ms. Strout is also the author of Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, and Abide with Me, a national bestseller and Book Sense pick. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker.
She has been teaching literature and writing at Manhattan Community College for ten years and has also taught writing at the New School and at the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina. Born in Portland, Maine, Elizabeth now lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.
—Leah