«I don't think there was a particular book that made me want to write. They all did. I always wanted to write.» Born in Portland (Maine), Elisabeth Strout lives in New York with her husband and daughter. Graduated in English Literature at Bates College in 1977 and Law at the Syracuse University, after a brief working experience in the legal field she taught at the Department of English Studies at Manhattan Community College in New York. Her vocation for writing becomes public for the first time in 1982 with the publication of a short story in the magazine New Yorker. With her novel Amy e Isabelle in 1999 she was awarded the Art Seidenbaum Award and was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award and for the Orange Prize for fiction. The vicissitudes of the two protagonists, set against the background of a provincial American small town are emblematic of Strout's strong themes, made of realistic and ruthless close examination of family and community relations. In 2009, she published Olive Kitteridge with which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The book was later adapted into a famous HBO miniseries in 2014. This was followed by other equally accomplished works such as The Burgess Boys (2013), compared to classics like Philip Roth's American Pastoral; My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), «a perfect novel, in which carefully chosen words vibrate with silences» (The New York Times); and Anything Is Possible (2017), which gives voice to characters who remained in the background in the previous novel. More recently came Olive, Again (2020), Oh William! (2022), Lucy by the Sea (2024), and Tell Me Everything (2025), all of them pieces of a memorable narrative universe.

(photo: © Festivaletteratura)