Author Elizabeth Strout, who taught at Colgate two years ago and will return to campus this fall, has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Strout won for her book Olive Kitteridge, a series of 13 connected short stories centered on a school teacher living in a hardscrabble town in coastal Maine. The Pulitzer citation says her collection of stories “packs a cumulative emotional wallop, bound together by polished prose and by Olive, the title character, blunt, flawed and fascinating.”
Strout taught creative writing at Colgate in the fall of 2007. She returned to campus last spring for a reading of Olive Kitteridge, and she is scheduled to come to campus again Oct. 22 as part of the Living Writers course taught by professors Jane Pinchin and Jennifer Brice.
“Liz is a generous writer. Olive Kitteridge a most wonderful book.” said Pinchin, chair of the Department of English. “There’s real joy here for all who know her. And we look forward to having students read her work this fall, and get the chance to discuss it with her.”
Strout is 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 and O: The Oprah Magazine.
She lives in New York City.