“Through literature is the only time we really get to experience what it might be like to be inside somebody else’s head.” American writer Elizabeth Strout shares her thoughts on writing as a way to see the world without judgment.
When Elizabeth Strout was still a child, she realised that she would only ever experience life through her own eyes. To her, this thought was “devastating” until she realised that reading offered her a way into the inner lives of others. She spent the earliest years largely alone in the woods, where “the beauty of the physical world was my first real friend”. Later, she turned her attention to the people around her.
Her mother taught her to notice details that might reveal something about strangers’ lives; an unfixed hem, a hesitant walk, an expression on a person’s face: “I have been watching people my entire life,” she explains. In New York, Strout found the subway to become a place of observation, but translating her findings into fiction required discipline: “I had to train myself to learn the sentences. To get it from my head into another head. From one living mind to another.”
Though her prose has become more sparse over time, Strout’s fundamental interest remains the same: “the multiverses that everybody carries around with them.” To her, writing is both physically and mentally demanding: “You have to pull up your viscera,” she says. But writing also offers a certain freedom. Here, she suspends judgment, regardless of how badly a character of hers behaves: “I’m just there to report on them. I have love for them.”
Elizabeth Strout (b. 1956, Maine, U.S) is an American writer. Strout attended Bates College, graduating with a degree in English in 1977. Two years later, she attended Syracuse University College of Law, where she earned a law degree and a Certificate in Gerontology. She worked briefly for Legal Services before moving to New York City, where she became an adjunct in the English Department of Borough of Manhattan Community College. By this time, she was publishing more stories in literary magazines, Redbook, and Seventeen. Her first novel, Amy and Isabelle, won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and for the Orange Prize in England; her 2016 novel My Name is Lucy Barton became a #1 New York Times bestseller and was longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. Her novel, Olive Kitteridge, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Elizabeth Strout was interviewed by Synne Rifbjerg at the Louisiana Literature festival in August 2026 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.
Camera: Rasmus Quistgaard
Edited and produced by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen
Music via Upright:
Satin by Pierre Tereygeol
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026
Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond.
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