Anne Carson has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. The 76-year-old Canadian poet, essayist, translator and classicist was in Iceland “listening to the wind” when the news broke. The Swedish Academy praised her “bold and inventive” oeuvre for its “playful dialogue with the classical tradition”, through which she has fashioned “new forms for contemporary literature”.
In books like her 1998 verse novel Autobiography of Red (which has sold nearly 100,000 copies in the United States), Wrong Norma (2024), her recent poetry collection, and her 1986 debut Eros the Bittersweet – a book-length essay about the god of love – she challenges formal conventions and moves across literary genres.
