Elizabeth Strout's Blog, page 2

“Set in Maine, Elizabeth Strout’s “Tell Me Everything” is a generous, compassionate novel about the human need for connection, understanding and love, and the damage that occurs when those things are denied. The story brings together Strout’s most beloved characters from previous books — Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton and the Burgess Boys — in a series of episodes that span a year, a time of great change.”

Laurie Hertzel, “Review: Elizabeth Strout brings together beloved characters in novel about connection,” Datebook, San Francisco Chronicle, Aug 30, 2024.

My new book, TELL ME EVERYTHING, comes out soon in both the US and the UK. Both covers are just lovely, I couldn’t be happier with them.

I’ll be on tour starting Sept 11, so please check the tour schedule and come say hello if you’re in the area!

“Readers Pick Their 100 Best Books of the 21st Century,” New York Times, July 18, 2024.

“When this novel-in-stories won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009, it was a victory for crotchety, unapologetic women everywhere, especially ones who weren’t, as Olive herself might have put it, spring chickens... Her small-town travails instantly became stand-ins for something much bigger, even universal.”

“The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century,” New York Times, July 8, 2024.

“The two characters that I have written who are older are Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton. It’s interesting because as I wrote them it was their character that was most important to me, and their age was simply a piece of that character. So even though I knew I was writing about older people I didn’t think about that in a way, except to make sure they were always who they were.”

Lisa Gornick, “Writing ‘Women of a Certain Age’: A Roundtable on Crafting Older Female Characters in Fiction: Lisa Gornick Hosts a Conversation with Julia Alvarez, Fiona Davis, Andrea Lee, and Elizabeth Strout” LitHub, November 27, 2023.

I’m honored to have received the Eudora Welty Foundation Prize for 2023. and to be invited to give the Eudora Welty Prize Lecture at the Folger Library.

Honored that Lucy by the Sea has been shortlisted for this year's Rathbones Folio Prize for fiction! Congratulations to the nominees in all three categories.

“How can you overcome stage fright? Viv Groskop talks to award-winning writer and nominee for this year’s Booker Prize, Elizabeth Strout, ahead of the ceremony.… Elizabeth tells Viv how the spaces that allow her to write are the ones in which she’s not needed by anyone. Riding the subway is good, but even better is her studio in Maine. ”

Viv Groskop, “Elizabeth Strout, Writer,” How to Own the Room (podcast), October 14, 2022.

The Booker Prize is the leading literary award in the English speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades. Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.

“Strout describes her writing style as that of “an embroiderer” – “I will pick it up and embroider a little green line, and come back later and embroider a leaf or something” – and her novels, intricately and painstakingly crafted, overlap and intertwine to create an instantly recognisable fictional landscape.”