Carson, 76, has previously won several prestigious literary prizes
The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded Thursday to Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.
Carson, 76, was recognized for “her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature,” the award-giving body said.
The academy said Carson was in Reykjavik, Iceland, “listening to the wind” when its representatives made contact with her and she was surprised to learn she had won. The poet divides her time between Iceland and Ann Arbor, Mich., and holds Icelandic and Canadian citizenship.
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Congratulations for Carson came from across the literary world and beyond, including from Canada’s prime minister.
“With wit, imagination and a style entirely her own, Canadian poet Anne Carson has reimagined the classics,” Mark Carney said on social media. “She has brought ancient stories to new audiences and transformed the way we think about literature.”
Carson, sitting outside her home at Aegissioa in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 2023. She divides her time between Iceland and Ann Arbor, Mich. (Kjartan Thorbjoernsson/Golli/Reuters)
The University of Toronto, where Carson earned her bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degrees in classics, also hailed the prize.
“This is a very proud moment for our global alumni community and for the entire university,” Melanie Woodin, U of T president, said in a statement.
Carson herself went on to teach at several prominent universities, including Princeton, McGill, Stanford and New York universities. One of her former students told CBC’s Andrew Nichols that she specifically went to NYU because she so desperately wanted to study with Carson.
“Her work changed everything that I knew about writing. It changed what I thought was possible,” said Jin Jin Xu, a poet herself, adding that Carson’s work helped shape her own.
“Her work always feels like it reimagines or is in conversation with something in the past but it’s also so uniquely her own voice.”
Poems as ‘drawings’
Carson was born in Toronto but moved around small-town Ontario growing up as her father, a bank manager, relocated for work.
She has been a champion of the classics and has won a host of literary awards for her original, contemporary reimaginings of ancient Greek and Latin texts and stories.
Norma Jeane Baker of Troy — which mixes the life of Marilyn Monroe with stories of Helen of Troy in Euripides’s play Helen — was awarded a 2020 Governor General Award in poetry.
WATCH | The moment Carson is awarded the prize:
Canadian Anne Carson wins Nobel Prize in Literature
October 8|
Duration
5:33Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature for ‘her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.’
‘A writer of the great fires’
The following year, she received a career achievement award from the PEN America Literary Awards, who called her a “visionary, sui generis writer,” with the judges announcing her honour in the form of a poem.
Carson’s first book of poetry, Canicula di Anna, was published in 1984, and her reputation in Canada and beyond burnished two years later with the publication of her first collection of essays, Eros the Bittersweet.
“She is a writer of the great fires — love, fury, grief — but also of the quotidian. She amuses and shatters,” her agent, Nicole Aragi, told the New York Times in a statement.
Through the years, she has also been known for translating and performing Greek and Latin works, as well as pieces adapted for operas, including We Need to Talk and H of H Playbook.
“Making a poem is making an object,” she previously told the CBC’s Writers & Company with Eleanor Wachtel. “I always thought of them more as drawings than as texts, but drawings that are also physically enterable through the fact of language.”
LISTEN | Anne Carson in conversation with CBC in 2011:
Writers and Company53:26How writer and scholar Anne Carson used elegy to piece together fragments of her late brother
3rd Canadian-born winner
The Swedish academy also noted her strong work in the 1990s, including Glass, Irony and God,which it said “demonstrates the potential of the long poem where genre boundaries are seen to blur.” Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, which reinterprets the ancient Greek poem Geryoneis through the eyes of a winged, gay teenager and became a cult favourite, “demonstrates her eminent ability to actualize the classical literary tradition,” it said
In 2002, she became the first woman to win Britain’s T.S. Eliot Prize for The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos.
Two years ago, in a London Review of Books essay, Carson revealed that she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
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