OH WILLIAM! on the Longlist for the Booker Prize

No-one writes interior life as Strout does. This is meticulous observed writing, full of probing psychological insight. Lucy Barton is one of literature’s immortal characters – brittle, damaged, unravelling, vulnerable and most of all, ordinary, like us all.
— The 2022 judges on Oh William!

Lovely to find OH WILLIAM! on the longlist for the Booker Prize! Many thanks to the judges for their kind words and congratulations to the other nominees.

LitHub: Cover Reveal: Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea.

I’m delighted to share the cover of my forthcoming book, Lucy by the Sea! It was designed by Anna Kochman and Greg Mollica, with art by Jeremy Miranda.

As I told LitHub, I think it’s gorgeous and captures the fear and the exhilaration of all that happens in this book.

Lucy by the Sea will be on sale from Random House on September 20th, 2022. You can preorder it now.

Exclusive cover reveal: Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea,” LitHub, March 22, 2022.

A Conversation with Elena Ferrante

The author of the Neapolitan quartet and the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist discuss identity, ambition, truth – and the ‘convulsive’ urge to write.

Here is what I believe: it is the pressure between the lines of the text, and the pressure rising up from under the text, and the pressure that is running above the text, that gives the writing its meaning, it is the unwritten sitting right next to the written, which makes something go beyond the explanation of the team of experts. And this is what happens when you go outside the margins (if I understand you correctly) and it is this which is mysterious, that we aim for.
— Elizabeth Strout
No matter how love for others and language as an act of love try continuously, insistently, desperately to get outside the margins of the suffocating first-person singular, we remain bodies organically enclosed in our isolation. Once I recognised this, I was convinced that the other can be truthfully described only through an “I” that is colliding and in the collision unravels.
— Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante and Elizabeth Strout, “‘I felt different as a child. I was nearly mute’: Elena Ferrante in conversation with Elizabeth Strout,” The Guardian, March 5, 2022.