The American writer Elizabeth Strout received the Siegfried Lenz Prize, which is endowed with 50,000 euros, in Hamburg City Hall on Friday. Strout, born in Portland in 1956, is “an outstanding storyteller who knows how to unfold the panorama of small towns with all their provincial limitations with just a few strokes,” said the Siegfried Lenz Foundation.
To date, Strout has published eight novels. In 2009 she received the Pulitzer Prize for her work “Olive Kitteridge” (2007, Eng. “Overlooking the Sea”). The book is about a quirky retired math teacher in a small town in Maine. The book was made into a 2014 miniseries starring Frances McDormand.
Siegfried Lenz (“German hour”) is one of the most important German writers of the post-war period. He was born in 1926 and died in Hamburg in 2014. The prize is awarded every two years and is intended to honor international authors “whose creative work is close to the spirit of Siegfried Lenz.”
Previous winners include the Israeli Amos Oz, the Englishman Julian Barnes and the American Richard Ford. In 2019, the jury honored an author from Eastern Europe with Ljudmilla Ulitzkaja.
