Native of Portland, Elizabeth Strout is one of the most interesting voices on the contemporary literary scene. She taught literature and writing at Manhattan Community College and writing at the New School. In 1998 her first novel Amy and Isabelle, acclaimed by readers and critics alike as a true literary event, became a finalist of the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, also winning the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. With a gift for refined psychological introspection, which she expresses in a sober and concise style, in 2005 Strout wrote Abide with Me and in 2009 took the Pulitzer Prize for Literature with Olive Kitteridge, 2008, (translated into Italian in 2009, winning the Bancarella and Mondello book awards in 2010 and 2012 respectively). After The Burgess Boys, 2013, in 2016 she released My Name is Lucy Barton, the heroine of which, herself a writer, acts as the unifying figure of the characters and events narrated in her latest novel Anything Is Possible, 2017, set in the Midwest.