Author Elizabeth Strout, who taught at Colgate two years ago and will return to campus this fall, has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Strout won for her book Olive Kitteridge, a series of 13 connected short stories centered on a school teacher living in a hardscrabble town in coastal Maine. The Pulitzer citation says her collection of stories "packs a cumulative emotional wallop, bound together by polished prose and by Olive, the title character, blunt, flawed and fascinating."