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The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded Thursday to Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.
Carson, 76, was recognized for “her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature,” the award-giving body said.
The academy said Carson was surprised by the honour, who was in Iceland “listening to the wind” when they made contact with her.
Carson has won a host of literary awards in the past. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy — which mixes the life of Marilyn Monroe with stories of Helen of Troy in Euripides’s play Helen — was awarded a 2020 Governor General Award in poetry.
Author Anne Carson learned of Nobel win from Iceland
Anne Carson was in Iceland ‘listening to the wind’ when the Swedish Academy permanent secretary reached her to discuss the Canadian author’s selection as the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.
The following year, she received a career achievement award from the PEN America Literary Awards, who called her a “visionary, sui generis writer,” with the judges announcing her honour in the form of a poem.
The Toronto native’s first book of poetry Canicula di Anna was published in 1984, her reputation in Canada and beyond burnished two years later with the publication of her first collection of essays, Eros the Bittersweet.
LISTEN | Anne Carson in conversation with CBC in 2011:
Writers and Company53:26How writer and scholar Anne Carson used elegy to piece together fragments of her late brother
Through the years she has also been known for translating Greek and Latin works, as well as pieces adapted for operas, including We Need to Talk and H of H Playbook.
“Making a poem is making an object,” she has previously told the CBC’s Writers & Company with Eleanor Wachtel. “I always thought of them more as drawings than as texts, but drawings that are also physically enterable through the fact of language.”
The Swedish academy also noted her strong work in the 1990s, including Glass, Irony and God, which it said “demonstrates the potential of the long poem where genre boundaries are seen to blur,” and Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, which “demonstrates her eminent ability to actualize the classical literary tradition.”
In 2002, she became the first woman to win Britain’s T.S. Eliot Prize for The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos.
Two years ago, in a London Review of Books essay, Carson revealed that she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
In addition to her published works, Carson has taught courses at universities in Canada and the U.S.
Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Toni Morrison and V.S. Naipaul are among the notable writers to receive the award since its inception in 1901. Saul Bellow (1976) and Alice Munro (2013) are the previous Canadian-born writers to be awarded the prize, though Bellow moved to the U.S. as a child and launched his career there.
The committee has also occasionally awarded the prize to figures not foremost known as literary figures, including Winston Churchill and Bob Dylan.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday, with the Nobel’s economics prize following on Monday. The Nobel prizes are presented to the laureates on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.
Prize winners this year receive 12 million Swedish crowns, or $1.7 million Cdn.
Nobel, the Swedish chemist and entrepreneur, dictated in his will that the bulk of his estate should be used to fund “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.”