In 2009 Strout was honored with a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Olive Kitteridge (2008), a collection of connected short stories about a woman and her immediate family and friends on the coast of Maine. She was also on the faculty of the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina. She was a NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) professor at Colgate University during the Fall Semester of 2007, where she taught creative writing at both the introductory and advanced level. The novel was made into a television movie starring Elisabeth Shue and produced by Oprah Winfrey's studio, Harpo Films. It took her six or seven years to write Amy and Isabelle, which when published was shortlisted for the 2000 Orange Prize and nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Strout moved to New York City, and continued to write stories that were published in literary magazines, as well as in Redbook and Seventeen. That year her first story was published in New Letters magazine. In 1982 she graduated with honors, and received both a law degree from the Syracuse University College of Law and a Certificate of Gerontology from the Syracuse School of Social Work. After graduating from Bates College, she spent a year in Oxford, England, followed by studies at law school for another year.

Her father was a science professor, and her mother taught high school. She was born in Portland, Maine, and raised in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire.

Currently-lives in Brooklyn, New York, and in Maine.Įlizabeth Strout is an American writer of fiction.

and Certificate of Gerontology, Syracuse University Witty and often profound, Amy and Isabelle confirms Elizabeth Strout as a powerful new talenta. As news of the scandal reaches every ear, it is Isabelle who suffers from the harsh judgment of Shirley Falls, intensifying her shame about her own secret past.Īnd as Amy seeks comfort elsewhere, she discovers the fragility of human happiness through other dramas, from the horror of a missing child to the trials of Fat Bev, the community peacemaker. And eating, sleeping, and working side by side in the gossip-ridden mill town of Shirley Falls doesn't help matters.īut when Amy is discovered behind the steamed-up windows of a car with her math teacher, the vast and icy distance between mother and daughter becomes unbridgeable. In most ways, Isabelle and Amy are like any mother and her 16-year-old daughter, a fierce mix of love and loathing exchanged in their every glance. In her stunning first novel, Amy and Isabelle, Elizabeth Strout evokes a teenager's alienation from her distant mother-and a parent's rage at the discovery of her daughter's sexual secrets.

Amy and isabelle by elizabeth strout