Anne CarsonJay Dixit
Former McGill professor Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Carson is being honoured “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature,” said the Swedish Academy, which made the announcement Thursday. The prize is worth about $1.7 million (Cdn) and recognizes a lifetime body of work.
She is a poet, essayist, translator, and classicist. She was educated at the University of Toronto and joined the Classics Department at McGill in 1988. In 2000, she was appointed John MacNaughton Professor of Classics. She left McGill in 2002 to teach at the University of Michigan.
“Anne Carson’s Nobel Prize in Literature is a source of profound pride for the entire McGill community,” said H. Deep Saini, President and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University. “Her work has reshaped the literary landscape and inspired not only generations of writers, scholars and readers, but also the many students and colleagues who were fortunate to learn and work alongside her at McGill. We are delighted to see her exceptional contributions recognized.”
Carson’s numerous books and translations have been rewarded with the Lannan Literary Award, two Griffin Poetry Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, and the PEN/Nabokov Award, and she has been the recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships. In 2005, she was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada.
“This is a wonderfully deserved honour for Anne Carson, whose work has captivated readers around the world by bringing ancient voices into conversation with the present,” said Lisa Shapiro, McGill’s Dean of Arts. “Her extraordinary talent, originality and intellectual depth have had a profound influence on contemporary literature. We are proud that McGill was her academic home for many years and delighted to see her remarkable contributions recognized on the world stage.”
English Department Chair Professor Eli MacLaren hailed Carson as a tremendous poet.
“She’s like a star athlete: with her qualifications as a scholar, she brings a lifetime of dedicated training to her art, but in the performance, she makes it seem easy” MacLaren said. “If you’ve never read Anne Carson, I would recommend starting with her poem, “Sumptuous Destitution” (from Men in the Off Hours, Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), which weaves real and imagined voices together to show us the labyrinth of oppression that even the most talented women face in living their life and pursuing their goals.”
Carson becomes the 12th McGill-affiliated Nobel laureate; McGill counts more than any other Canadian university.
“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. She has herself identified the etymology of words as the starting point for all her work,” the Nobel committee wrote.
Carson was born in Toronto in 1950.