Canadian poet Anne Carson wins Nobel literature prize

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on Thursday to Canadian poet Anne Carson, an essayist and classicist who brings a modern twist to mysticism and antiquity in her writings about love, desire and despair.

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The 76-year-old — who announced in 2024 that she has Parkinson’s disease — was honoured “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature,” the Swedish Academy said.

The permanent secretary of the Academy, Ingrid Carlberg, said she had briefly spoken to Carson.

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“We didn’t have so much time to speak. All she had time to tell me was that she is for the moment in Iceland, where she’s listening to the wind.”

“She was taken by surprise, but very happy. I could hear that in her voice.”

A professor of classics with a background in dead languages, literature, anthropology and history, she was described by The New York Times in 2001 as “one of the great pasticheurs.”

Her unique contemporary poetry earned her several key literary prizes in the 1990s, including the 1996 Lannan Award and the 1997 Pushcart Prize.

A year later, “Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse” — loosely based on the Greek myth of the monster Geryon and Herakles but transformed into a modern tale of a gay love triangle — received widespread praise.

The Academy said almost all of Carson’s literary production “has centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning.”

It singled out her poem “Nox”, printed on one continuous sheet of paper in homage to her brother who died in 2000, as “an unforgettable work”.

“Palpable here is a deep sense of loss that works its way up from below. The result is a creation as sculptural as it is literary, an epitaph in the form of a box containing an accordion-fold-out of pictures, letters and other written texts dedicated to her dead brother,” the Academy said.

Carson has been mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate for years.

Women under-represented

Many literary critics had predicted the award would go to a woman this year, given the frequent criticism directed at the Academy over the overrepresentation of Western white men among its picks.

There have been just 19 women laureates out of 122 since the Nobel literature prize was first awarded in 1901.

A 2018 sex assault scandal left the Academy in tatters and more than half of its 18 members were replaced.

Since then, every other literature laureate has been a woman.

Last year, the award went to Hungary’s Laszlo Krasznahorkai, whose works explore themes of postmodern dystopia.

The literature prize is the fourth of the six Nobels to be announced over the course of a week.

The winners of the medicine, physics and chemistry prizes were announced earlier this week in Stockholm, while the peace prize will be announced in Oslo on Friday.

Among those seen as possibilities are the Save the Children charity and Mykola Kuleba, a Ukrainian children’s rights activist campaigning for the return of kids illegally taken to Russia from occupied territories.

Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms (ERR), a vast network of volunteers risking their lives to help people facing the double threat of war and hunger, could also be a potential laureate.

Yet others mentioned are the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese, Pope Leo XIV, press freedoms with an award to the Committee to Protect Journalists, or international justice bodies such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The Nobel economics prize will round up the 2026 awards season on Monday.

Each Nobel prize comes with a diploma, a gold medal and a $1.2 million prize sum, to be shared if there is more than one laureate in each discipline.

Carson will receive the award from King Carl XVI Gustaf in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist and prize creator Alfred Nobel.

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