Canadian poet and translator Anne Carson has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Reuters reports.
The Swedish Academy awarded Carson with the prize “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
Only two other Canadian writers, Saul Bellow and Alice Munro, have previously won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Carson, a Toronto native, was educated at the University of Toronto, where she received a Ph.D. in classics. She made her literary debut in 1984 with a work of poetry, Canicula di Anna, and followed that up two years later with a volume of criticism, Eros the Bittersweet.
Her best known books, which often mix genres including poetry, prose, and translation, are her 1998 novel-in-verse Autobiography in Red; its 2013 follow-up, Red Doc>, and her 2024 poetry collection Wrong Norma, which was a finalist for a National Book Award. In a review of her 2016 book Float, a Kirkus reviewer wrote, “Carson is by temperament both experimental poet and traditional classical scholar…heavy on linguistic parsing and close reading on the one hand and lightning bursts of metaphorical insight on the other.”
Carson lives in Canada and Iceland. Asked by RUV, a broadcaster in Ireland, about the award, she said, “Crazy, I think they're all crazy. I'll get a sticker on the front of my book."
Deb Garrison, the poetry editor at Knopf, which publishes Carson’s work in the U.S., said in a statement, “Anne Carson’s brilliant work is a gift to our literature and to readers everywhere….Love, climate, culture, beauty and the many voices that speak them into existence are all lit on the page by her blazing intelligence and candor, as she invites us continually into an ongoing dialogue of existential significance.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
