Canadian poet and writer Anne Carson, whose work often blends verse, prose, dialogue and translation in a genre-defying mix, won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for what the Swedish Academy called her “bold and inventive oeuvre”.
“Crazy, I think they’re all crazy,” Carson told Icelandic broadcaster RUV when asked how she was feeling after learning she had won while on the Arctic island. “I’ll get a sticker on the front of my book.”
Carson, 76, who was born in Toronto and has a home in Iceland, had been taken by surprise when called with the news, said Ingrid Carlberg, permanent secretary of the Academy, which awards the prize worth 12 million Swedish crowns ($1.2 million).
“All she had time to tell me was that she is for the moment in Iceland, where she’s listening to the wind,” Carlberg told a press conference in Stockholm after the announcement.
She is widely known for her translations of classical Greek literature, which heavily influences her work that ranges from opera libretti to literary criticism and verse novels such as “Autobiography of Red” from 1998.
“Genre is something for booksellers. It’s something you do in order to appeal to an audience and make them buy books. And on what shelf do you put Anne Carson’s books? It’s on a shelf of her own,” said Swedish novelist Steve Sem-Sandberg, who is a member of the award committee. “That’s what I like about her.”
‘NEW FORMS OF CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE’
In its citation, the Swedish Academy said it was recognising Carson “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.
“Almost all her literary production has centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning,” the Academy said.
“She has herself identified the etymology of words as the starting point for all her work. Her translations from Classical Greek may be regarded as independent works in their own right.”
Her style is exemplified in “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy” from 2019, a performance piece which mixes the stories of Helen of Troy in Euripides’ play “Helen” with Marilyn Monroe.
LIFE WITHOUT PROUST
Often heralded as her greatest work, “Autobiography of Red” demonstrates Carson’s ability to “actualise the classical literary tradition”, the Academy said. In the book, she re-examines age-old questions such as “What happens when you love someone who will ultimately destroy you?”
Tapping into more modern inspirations, Carson reflected on the character of Albertine, one of the narrator Marcel’s love interests in Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”, in her own book “The Albertine Workout”.
Carson had spent seven years reading Proust’s masterpiece and said in an interview with Canada’s CBC Radio One in 2016 that she suffered withdrawal symptoms after finishing, leading her to write “The Albertine Workout” as a way to prolong the experience.
“You think life goes on after Proust, but it seems so grey,” she said.
BOXING LESSONS TO FIGHT PARKINSON’S
Carson started taking boxing lessons when she was already in her 70s because of a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis. The sport is recommended as a therapy because it helps with paying attention to hand-eye coordination and the sequencing of actions.
She reflected on the disease’s impact on her handwriting in an interview at the Louisiana Literary Festival in Denmark in 2024: “I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame … the shame of bad handwriting.”
Carson, who has taught classics at universities in Canada and the United States, has said that she considers herself a visual artist as much as a literary one.
“I think of making a poem as making an object. I have always thought of them more as drawings than as texts, but drawings that are also physically enterable through the fact of language,” she said in the CBC interview.
Poetry, she says, may be more attuned to the fast modern-day life than long-form writing.
“I think it’s probably more useful than prose right now because it’s faster and everybody is in a hurry so basically it’s good because it is brief,” she told the Icelandic broadcaster on Thursday.
When asked by the Nobel Committee about her own sources of inspiration, however, she listed ancient Greek poet Homer, author of “The Odyssey” epic.
As to how the classical stories she has reinterpreted in her work might be relevant to modern audiences, she said: “I don’t think I’m interested in relevance.”
‘AT HOME’ IN ICELAND AND NYC
Carson and her husband, artist Robert Currie, first came to Iceland after the 2008 banking collapse and gradually spent more time there. “We got to know people and we liked the people,” Carson told Iceland Review in 2023.
She has held citizenship of Iceland since 2022.
Currie told the magazine Iceland was one of only two places that immediately felt like home to him, the other being New York City in the 1970s.
Literature was the fourth of this year’s Nobels to be announced this week, following medicine, physics and chemistry. The peace prize winner will be announced in Oslo on Friday.
Established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes have been awarded since 1901.
Carson, who had been among the favourites this year, takes a place beside luminaries such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alice Munro and Ernest Hemingway as a recipient of the award. Last year’s prize was won by Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
($1 = 10.0190 Swedish crowns)
(Reporting by Simon Johnson, Johan Ahlander, Niklas Pollard and Marie Mannes)
