GANO EL PULITZER 2009

Elizabeth Strout wins Pulitzer Prize

Rank outsider Elizabeth Strout has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her novel, Olive Kitteridge. Strout beat a pack of literary heavyweights, including Philip Roth, John Updike, Toni Morrison, Annie Proulx, Jhumpa Lahiri, and the hot favorite Marilynne Robinson.Set in a small town in Maine, Olive Kitteridge binds together 13 short stories. Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, hates change but rarely notices the changes taking place around her.Strout was raised in small communities in New Hampshire and Maine. The Pulitzer judges said the book "packs a cumulative emotional wallop, bound together by polished prose and by Olive, the title character, blunt, flawed and fascinating."Discover Olive Kitteridge and previous Pulitzer winnersFind copies of Olive Kitteridge

author spotlight
Elizabeth Strout is the author of Abide with Me, a national bestseller and Book Sense pick, and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. 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 is on the faculty of the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and lives in New York City.