Elizabeth Strout, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008 for her novel Olive Kitteridge, will be the featured guest at the annual Book Lover’s Luncheon on Thursday, November 3, 2011 from 12:00am – 2:00pm. Held at the Quinnipiack Club, 221 Church Street in New Haven, the luncheon benefits the public library. Tickets are $150.00 per person and include lunch plus a signed book. Strout attended Bates College, graduating with a degree in English in 1977. Two years later, she went to Syracuse University College of Law, where she received a law degree along with a Certificate in Gerontology. She worked briefly for Legal Services, before moving to New York City, where she became an adjunct in the English Department of Borough of Manhattan Community College. By this time she was publishing more stories in literary magazines and Redbook and Seventeen. Juggling the needs that came with raising a family and her teaching schedule, she found a few hours each day to work on her writing.
In 1998, Amy and Isabelle was published to much critical acclaim. The novel had taken almost seven years to write, and only her family and close friends knew she was working on it. Six years later she published Abide With Me, and three years after that, Olive Kitteridge. While her life as a writer has increasingly become a more public one, she remains as devoted to the crafting of honest fiction as she was when she was sixteen years old, sending out her first stories.
Having lived in New York for almost half her life, she continues to thrill at the crowded sidewalks and the subways and the small corner delis. “It’s simple,” she has said. “For me – there is nothing more interesting than life.”
For more information about the Book Lover’s Luncheon, and to purchase tickets, please contact Clare Meade, Library Development Office, 860-978-8155, email at cmeade@nhfpl.org, or visit the library’s website at: www.cityofnewhaven.com/library