The Canadian writer Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. “For her bold and inventive body of work that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature,” according to the Swedish Academy.
Anne Carson (Toronto, Canada, June 21, 1950), professor of Classical and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, is also a renowned poet, essayist, and translator. A bilingual edition of the poems of Sappho that she found in a bookstore changed her life forever: “The vision of the two pages juxtaposed, one of them an impenetrable text, but of great visual beauty, captivated me and I bought the book.” She left studies twice at the University of Toronto, in St. Michael’s College, mainly due to curricular demands (especially the requirement of a course on John Milton). After spending some time working in graphic arts, she completed her studies at St. Andrews (Scotland), where in 1986 she earned a PhD with a thesis on Sappho.
Specialist in classical culture and languages and in comparative literature, anthropology, history and advertising, Carson is, in the judgment of critics, one of the most exquisite and erudite writers of contemporary literature, in addition to being the author of a hypnotic body of work that fuses styles, references and formats, and leans toward hybridity between the Greco-Latin, medieval and contemporary. For her, translation and creation are synonymous terms. She has stated: “If I knew what poetry was, I would have no need to write. It is something I grope for in the dark,” and also that “you write about what you want to write in the way you have to.” Thus she has built an exquisite world, a collage between poetry, discourse, essay and drama, with contributions sometimes even to opera. In her first book, Eros (1986, with the same title in Spanish in 2015), Carson ponders the nature of romantic love and erotic desire using prose fragments that interlace with verses. Among her most admired poets are Homer, Thomas Hardy and the British Stevie Smith, whom she calls “exalted,” and she regards Virginia Woolf as the most important figure in the history of literature. At the age of 42 she published Short Talks (1992), a work followed by the titles Plainwater (1995) (a portion of it translated into Spanish: Tipos de agua. El camino de Santiago, 2000); The Glass Essay (1995); her well-known work Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998) (Autobiografía de rojo. Una novela en verso, 2016); Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Ceos with Paul Celan (1999); Men in the Off Hours (2000) (Hombres en sus horas libres, 2007), a collection of epitaphs, love poems, verse essays and screenplay sketches; The Beauty of the Husband (2001) (La belleza del marido: un ensayo narrativo en 29 tangos, 2003); If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002) (Si no, el invierno. Fragmentos de Safo, 2019); Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005) (Decreación, 2014); Nox (2010, with the same title in Spanish in 2018); Antigonick (2012); Red Doc [sic] (2013) and Float (2016).
Awards include the Lannan Poetry Prize (USA, 1996), the Pushcart Prize (USA, 1997), the T. S. Eliot Prize (UK, 2001), the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation (USA, 2010) and the Griffin Poetry Prize (Canada, 2014). Anne Carson is an honorary doctor of the University of Toronto and has enjoyed fellowships from the Guggenheim (1998) and the MacArthur Foundation (2000).