Anne Carson wins Nobel Prize in Literature 2026

Canadian writer Anne Carson, 76, has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.Carson, who was born in Toronto in 1950, has, throughout her career, combined poetry writing with translation work and teaching classics at various universities in North America. She revealed in a London Review of Books Essay in 2024 that she has Parkinson’s disease. “A symptom particularly mortifying to me was that my handwriting disintegrated,” she wrote. “I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame.”Former Irish Times poetry critic John McAuliffe, choosing Carson’s Float as his book of the year in 2016, wrote:“Anne Carson’s Float collects 22 pamphlets in a clear slipcase, including poems about the death of her older brother (which she so memorably wrote about in Nox (2010)), brilliant litanies which draw on Ancient Greek poets and 20th-century visual art (and, in one case, the instruction manual for her microwave), funny, theatrical poems for Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, and cross-genre essays, including the reflection on Francis Bacon, Variations on the Right to Remain Silent, which was initially commissioned by Belinda McKeon and first performed at the Poetry Now festival in Dún Laoghaire.”READ MOREFloat is the best new “book” I’ve read this year, funny, bleak and urgent, as might be gathered from Carson’s definition of her art: “If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.”Almost all Carson’s literary production has centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning. She has herself identified the etymology of words as the starting point for all her work.There have been 122 literature laureates to date. Carson is only the 19th woman to be awarded the prize. The youngest laureate was 41, the oldest 87.The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. More than 200 people are nominated each year, then a longlist of 20 and a shortlist of five writers are drawn up.The prize was won last year by Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai.