\nElizabeth, 63, is the author of six novels, including My Name is Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She lives in New York and Maine with her husband James, and has a grown-up daughter<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
My childhood took place in a small town in New Hampshire and another small town in Maine. We didn\u2019t have a television and there weren\u2019t many children around. I spent a great amount of time outdoors alone.<\/p>\n
I was a mediocre student at Bates College [in Maine], but I loved my time there, the world was opening up to me. I wanted to be a writer. This had been my plan since my earliest memory.<\/p>\n
I waitressed after graduating, then went to law school and practised law for six months before getting laid off. I was a terrible lawyer, but law school helped me think differently, stripping away the excessive emotion I had in the way I thought. Later, I moved to New York City and taught at a community college while I wrote. There were years and years of rejections but inside, I felt that I could do it.<\/p>\n
It was very difficult when I was teaching and taking care of my family \u2013 often I had only two hours, three times a week, to write. I taught 7am classes in order to get back home and write before my daughter got home from school. It wasn\u2019t easy.<\/p>\n
I found it a struggle to get [my first novel] Amy and Isabelle published. I couldn\u2019t find an agent, but I sent it to an editor at Random House who loved it. While writing it, I realised I was finally doing it \u2013 writing the\u00a0way I wanted to. It was as though I\u2019d learned finally to ride a bicycle.<\/p>\n
The idea for my [third] novel, Olive Kitteridge, came to me one day when I was unloading the dishwasher. I could feel her behind me. I never expected to return to this character, but she showed up a few years ago when I was in a caf\u00e9 in Norway, and I began writing my new novel, Olive, Again.<\/p>\n
I write from first thing after breakfast until lunchtime, putting off lunch for as long as possible because the energy gets broken by it. I get my best work done when I\u2019m writing in my studio, above a bookstore, in Maine \u2013 no one ever comes in. It is very hard for me to switch from working into my normal life; the characters stay with me.<\/p>\n
Elizabeth’s life in six books\u00a0<\/h3>\n The Collected Stories by William Trevor<\/strong>\u00a0Trevor was once described as \u2018the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language\u2019, and I have loved his work for years. It is always quietly compassionate.<\/p>\nGrand Union by Zadie Smith<\/strong>\u00a0This is a book that I just read and loved, as I have her other work. It\u2019s a collection of 11 short stories.<\/p>\nHateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro<\/strong>\u00a0I have enjoyed Munro\u2019s work for a long time, she brings such authority to the page. This short-story collection won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.<\/p>\n\nelizabeth strout books\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/figcaption>More<\/span><\/button><\/div>\n<\/figure>\nStory continues<\/span><\/button><\/p>\n\n
The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell\u00a0<\/strong>A great favourite of mine. The biography of one of the great figures of English literature (whose dictionary was published in 1755) was written by lawyer and diarist, Boswell.<\/p>\nWar and Peace by Leo Tolstoy<\/strong>\u00a0I love the Russians, and have recently reread War and Peace. I have also just read a biography of Tolstoy by Henri Troyat, which I thoroughly enjoyed.<\/p>\nFor Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway<\/strong>\u00a0I have no memory of reading children\u2019s books when I was growing up, but I read all of Ernest Hemingway\u2019s works \u2013 my grandfather had bought them from a travelling salesman.<\/p>\n\nelizabeth strout books\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/figcaption>More<\/span><\/button><\/div>\n<\/figure>\nInterview by Laura Powell\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nSign up for\u00a0Stella Daily\u00a0– your seven-day slice of fashion, beauty, food, travel, interiors and more from the Stella magazine team<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n[ad_2]Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[ad_1] Elizabeth, 63, is the author of six novels, including My Name is Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She lives in New York and Maine with her husband James, and has a grown-up daughter My childhood took place in a small town in New Hampshire and another small …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":192844,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-33"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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