New Yorker Elizabeth Strout has won the Pulitzer prize for fiction
for a short story collection set in small-town Maine.
Strout’s Olive Kitteridge is a collection of 13 interlinked short
stories. Detailing the lives and problems of the residents of Crosby,
Maine, from a musician haunted by a past romance to a former student who
has lost the will to live, it is held together by the central,
larger-than-life character of retired schoolteacher Olive Kitteridge.
Judges for the $10,000 prize, awarded to a work of distinguished
fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life,
said that Strout’s work “packs a cumulative emotional wallop, bound
together by polished prose and by Olive, the title character, blunt,
flawed and fascinating”.
 Strout, previously a finalist for the Orange prize and for the
PEN/Faulkner award, beat an all-female line-up of finalists to take the
Pulitzer, seeing off competition from Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of
Doves, which explores racial tensions between Native Americans and
whites in North Dakota, and Christine Schutt’s All Souls, in which a
student at an all girls’ Manhattan prep school battles a rare form of
cancer. Schutt’s novel was “fiercely honest, carefully observed and
subtly rendered”, said judges, while Erdrich’s was “haunting”.
Previous winners of the fiction Pulitzer, which was first awarded in
1948, include Harper Lee, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. In more
recent years the honours have gone to Cormac McCarthy for The Road,
Annie Proulx for The Shipping News and, last year, Junot Díaz for The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.The history Pulitzer went to The
Hemingses of Monticello:
An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed, which explores the
generations of a slave family and casts new light on the relationship
between Sally Hemings and her master, Thomas Jefferson. Another title
scrutinising America’s history of slavery, Slavery by Another Name:
The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War
II by Douglas A Blackmon, won the general non-fiction prize, while the
biography award was won by Jon Meacham’s portrait of Andrew Jackson,
American Lion.Previous winner WS Merwin took the poetry Pulitzer for his
collection The Shadow of Sirius, a selection of poems focusing on the
power of memory which judges said was both “luminous [and] tender”.
The prizes, all worth $10,000, will be awarded to the winners on 28
May.
-Guardian, UK
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