Anne Carson, Canadian Poet and Classicist, Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature

Anne Carson, the Canadian poet, essayist and translator whose work braids ancient Greek literature into strikingly modern forms, won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.

The Swedish Academy praised what it called her bold and inventive body of work, which in playful dialogue with the classical tradition has created new forms for contemporary writing. The prize carries 12 million Swedish kronor, about $1.2 million. Ingrid Carlberg, the academy’s permanent secretary, said she reached Carson by phone in Iceland shortly before the announcement, where the writer said she was listening to the wind. Carlberg said Carson was very taken by surprise.

Carson, 76, was born in Toronto in 1950 and has taught classics at universities including Princeton, New York University and McGill in Montreal. She and her husband, Robert Currie, became Icelandic citizens in 2022, according to the Associated Press.

Her first book, Eros the Bittersweet, published in 1986, examined desire in ancient Greek literature, mixing scholarship with something closer to lyric meditation. Her best-known work, the 1998 verse novel Autobiography of Red, takes fragments by the Greek poet Stesichorus about Geryon, a red-winged monster killed by Herakles, and turns them into the story of a modern young man in love and heartbreak. Men in the Off Hours won Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001, and The Beauty of the Husband won Britain’s T.S. Eliot Prize the same year.

Carson’s books often refuse to sit still. Nox, published in 2010, is a box holding an accordion-folded reproduction of a notebook she made after the death of her brother, who had been absent from her life for decades, including her translation of an elegy by Catullus for his own brother. Anders Olsson, who chairs the Nobel literature committee, described it as both sculptural and literary. Her translations of Sappho, Sophocles and Euripides are, in the academy’s words, works in their own right.

Olsson said nearly all of her writing sits at the meeting point of a philologist’s obsession with words and a poet’s hunger for new meaning, and that her mixing of influences from the Greeks to Keats, Virginia Woolf and Emily Brontë yields playful, ironic work that moves across genres. According to the Guardian, Carson, asked once why she keeps switching forms, put it down to restlessness.

Not every reader finds her experiments easy, and Carson herself has acknowledged, the Guardian noted, that her work can fall apart or grow too strange for some audiences. The newspaper also recalled that admirers, including the late Susan Sontag, have long said they would read anything she wrote.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called the award a proud moment for Canada, the Guardian reported. Carson disclosed in 2024 that she has Parkinson’s disease. She will receive the prize in Stockholm in December.