Anne Carson wins Nobel prize in literature 2026 | Nobel prize in literature

The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded to the Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson, the Swedish Academy has introduced.

The academy cited the creator’s “daring and ingenious oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical custom, has created new kinds for modern literature”.

The Nobel prize, considered essentially the most prestigious award in international literature, is awarded for a lifetime’s physique of labor. The winner receives 12m Swedish kronor (£900,000).

Ingrid Carlberg, the everlasting secretary of the Swedish Academy, mentioned she informed Carson of the information on the cellphone shortly earlier than the information broke. “She had time to inform me that she is, for the second, in Iceland, the place she is listening to the wind,” Carlberg mentioned. “She was taken unexpectedly however very completely satisfied. I might hear that in her voice.”

Born in Toronto in 1950, Carson is understood for work that moves freely between poetry, prose and translation, drawing closely on the literature and mythology of the traditional Greek globe. She has been a professor of classics at varied establishments together with Princeton, New York University and McGill University in Montreal. She is the nineteenth girl to win, out of 123 literature laureates.

Carson’s first guide, Eros the Bittersweet, was printed in 1986 and mixed literary criticism with an exploration of want and the traditional Greek custom.

Her best-known work is Autobiography of Red, a 1998 novel in verse impressed by the fragments of the traditional Greek poet Stesichorus. It reimagines the parable of Geryon, the red-winged monster killed by Herakles, because the story of a contemporary teenage boy navigating heartbreak and want.

In 2001, she grew to become the primary girl to win the TS Eliot prize, for her assortment The Beauty of the Husband. She has additionally been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships.

David Leonard, the manager director of the Writers’ Trust of Canada, mentioned: “Anne is such an excellent author. Her work is broad, but additionally extraordinarily good.” Calling Carson’s work “intoxicating”, he mentioned her four-decade profession had resulted in a peerless assortment of poems and essays. “They’re stunning, they’re good, they’re true and they’re humane. It’s precisely what we’d like in our writing.”

Carson’s work has attracted reward from fellow writers together with Susan Sontag, who as soon as mentioned: “She is without doubt one of the few writers writing in English that I might learn something she wrote. If there’s {a magazine} that has one thing of hers in it, I purchase it robotically.”

Anders Olsson, the chair of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee for Literature, praised Carson for work that had “damaged away from lyrical poetry certain to the narrative self and impressed new types of modern literature”. He mentioned: “This methodology of writing results in playful and ironic works that transfer not solely between classical and fashionable poetry but additionally between totally different genres and artforms.”

Carson’s books have ranged extensively in type. Men within the Off Hours mixed verse essays, poems, epitaphs and prose about artists and historic figures, and received the inaugural Griffin poetry prize in 2001. Decreation, one other eclectic work, introduced collectively poetry, essays and an opera.

Nox, printed in 2010, is especially attribute of Carson’s avant-garde method to literature – the guide takes the type of an accordion-fold field containing a replica of a pocket book Carson made after the loss of life of her brother. Her later works embody Red Doc> and Float.

In a Guardian review of Red Doc>, Sarah Crown wrote: “To interact so fluidly, so initially and compellingly, with a narrative first informed greater than 3,000 years in the past, is astonishing: her ambition is one factor; the truth that it’s so utterly achieved is, frankly, one thing else.”

Much of Carson’s work has emerged from her fascination with language itself. The Swedish Academy famous: “Almost all her literary manufacturing has centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with phrases and the poet’s want for brand new which means,” including that Carson had recognized the etymology of phrases as “the start line for all her work”.

Asked why she regularly moved between kinds, Carson mentioned in an interview: “Boredom I suppose. There is a restlessness. There are quite a lot of kinds to strive.”

She has acknowledged the difficulties that include her experimental fashion. “[My work] does disintegrate loads,” she mentioned in a 2018 interview. “It will get simply too bizarre for anybody to care about studying, or else it will get diluted right into a type of parody of itself.”

Ira Wells, the president of PEN Canada, mentioned Carson’s win “feels notably vital at a second during which Canada and Europe are strengthening cultural ties amidst broader international disruption. And, on an aesthetic degree, Carson’s verse vibrates on profound human frequencies, at a second during which an increasing number of language is formulated by machines.”

Carson has usually saved her private life out of interviews. However, in an August 2024 article for the London Review of Books, she disclosed that she had been recognized with Parkinson’s illness.

The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded on 118 earlier events since 1901. Recent laureates embody Annie Ernaux, Bob Dylan, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Louise Glück, Peter Handke and Olga Tokarczuk. Last yr’s recipient was the Hungarian creator László Krasznahorkai, recognized for his dystopic and avant-garde writing.

Carson, 76, will formally obtain the medal and diploma in a ceremony in Stockholm in December.