Elizabeth Strout '77, photographed in Portland, Maine, in spring 2006 by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Elizabeth Strout '77 has received the 2009 Pulitzer Prize award for fiction for her third novel, Olive Kitteridge. 

A Maine native, Strout is also the author of Abide with Me (2006) and Amy and Isabelle (1998), winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

Strout is the second alumni winner of a Pulitzer Prize. In 1944, F. Carleton Mabee '36 received the Pulitzer Prize for biography or autobiography for The American Leonardo: The Life of Samuel F B. Morse. Mabee is professor emeritus of history at the State Univesity of New York, New Paltz.

• Read one of the first stories on Strout's award in the Los Angeles Times, Feb. 20, 2008.
• Read an interview with Strout in the Summer 2006 Bates Magazine.
• Read the Publisher's Weekly review in February 2008 by alumnus Craig Morgan Teicher '01.
• Read Strout's answer to the question "Is this the book you set out to write?" on the Bates Bookshelf page.