The Booker Prizes, Longlist: The Things We Never Say, by Elizabeth Strout, July 28, 2026.
TIME: "How Elizabeth Strout Gets Inside People's Minds"
““Strout’s ability to breathe life into these non-superheroes, to create recognizable, flawed, sympathetic, interesting humans, has won her a huge following and many honors, including the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge.””
Belinda Luscombe, "How Elizabeth Strout Gets Inside People's Minds," TIME, Apr 28, 2026.
Photo: Fjodor Buis
Guardian Interview: ‘All ordinary people are extraordinary’
“I’ve always been fascinated with this sense that every single person walking down the street has a whole story. …And nobody ever really knows it, because we only tell parts of our story to different people, and oh, I just want to know it so much! I always have, so I make it up.”
Hephzibah Anderson, “Books interview: Elizabeth Strout: ‘All ordinary people are extraordinary,’” The Guardian, Sept 7, 2024.
LitHub: Writing 'Women of a Certain Age'
“The two characters that I have written who are older are Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton. It’s interesting because as I wrote them it was their character that was most important to me, and their age was simply a piece of that character. So even though I knew I was writing about older people I didn’t think about that in a way, except to make sure they were always who they were.”
The Guardian: Interview: There’s a quiet rumbling of violence in America.
“Strout describes her writing style as that of “an embroiderer” – “I will pick it up and embroider a little green line, and come back later and embroider a leaf or something” – and her novels, intricately and painstakingly crafted, overlap and intertwine to create an instantly recognisable fictional landscape.”
Lisa Allardice, “Interview: Elizabeth Strout: ‘There’s a quiet rumbling of violence in America. Is it going to expand and explode?,’” Books, The Guardian, September 24, 2022.