Anne Carson, who\u00a0honed her mastery of the classics at the University of Toronto before giving them new life in the modern age,\u00a0has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.<\/p>\n
A Canadian poet and essayist who earned three U of T degrees, Carson is the second Canadian woman \u2013 and first U of T alumna \u2013 to win the prestigious international prize, widely regarded as the world\u2019s highest literary honour. She was honoured for \u201cher bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature,\u201d according to the Nobel committee<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cOn behalf of the University of Toronto, I am absolutely delighted to congratulate alumna Anne Carson on winning the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature,\u201d said U of T President Melanie Woodin. \u201cThis is a very proud moment for our global alumni community and for the entire university.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Known for writing that resists categorization, Carson draws on the classical training she began at U of T to bring ancient Greek and Latin literature into conversation with the contemporary world, moving fluidly between verse and prose, translation and reimagination.\u00a0<\/p>\n She\u00a0learned of the win in Reykjav\u00edk, Iceland<\/a>, where, according to Ingrid Carlberg<\/a>, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, \u201cshe was listening to the wind.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt seems a little insane,\u201d Carson told\u00a0organizers in reaction to the announcement.<\/a> She added that she had been sweeping her kitchen when the phone started ringing, and only called back at the insistence of her husband, Robert Currie. Her plans to celebrate? Leaving her phone behind for a walk in the woods, where she and her spouse can \u201chear the quiet.\u201d<\/p>\n Just in! New Nobel Prize laureate in literature Anne Carson stands surprised in her kitchen in Reykjav\u00edk, Iceland. Stay tuned for our exclusive interview with her coming soon. Join us in congratulating our 2026 literature laureate – send your greetings in the comments.\u00a0<\/p>\n [image or embed]<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Nobel Prize (@nobelprize.org<\/a>) October 8, 2026 at 9:11 AM<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The 19th woman among 123 literature laureates, Carson joins the ranks of Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez \u2013 and fellow Canadian-born writers Alice Munro and Saul Bellow.\u00a0<\/p>\n Prime Minister Mark Carney was among those congratulating Carson on Thursday,\u00a0lauding her win as<\/a> \u201can extraordinary achievement and a proud moment for Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n Carson has a long and circuitous history at U of T. She first enrolled at St. Michael\u2019s College in 1968, but briefly dropped out to try her hand at graphic design. She later returned to the university to study Greek poetry, earning a bachelor\u2019s degree in 1974. She went on to receive two graduate degrees in the classics \u2013 a master\u2019s in 1975 and a PhD in 1981.<\/p>\n She also\u00a0received an honorary degree from U of T \u00a0in 2012<\/a> and, in 2020, served as the Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory<\/a>\u00a0at U of T\u2019s Centre for Comparative Literature, delivering a public lecture<\/a> titled \u201cStillness.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In a 2001 profile in U of T Magazine<\/a>,\u00a0Carson recalled spending nights studying at St. Michael\u2019s library as she was initiated into the \u201ccult\u201d of the classics.<\/p>\n \u201cClassics gives you complexity: the Greeks and Romans are so exemplary and so screwed up,\u201d she said. \u201cI struggle in the dark with my Greeks. It\u2019s a wrestling match.\u201d<\/p>\n That struggle would play out across a career of more than 20 books of translation, poetry, essay, scholarship and fiction, often blurring the lines between them.<\/p>\n Her 1986 debut, Eros the Bittersweet, announced her as a rigorous, if irreverent, interpreter of the ancients. The lyrical exploration of the Greeks\u2019 tormented tradition of desire captivated classicists, critics and poets alike.\u00a0<\/p>\n Carson cemented herself as a writer at home in each camp \u2013 but beholden to none \u2013 with her 1998 novel in verse Autobiography of Red, which\u00a0transforms a Greek myth about Herakles and a red, winged monster into a coming-of-age love story. The sequel,\u00a0Red Doc>,\u00a0made her the first two-time winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize\u2019s Canadian category in 2014. She had won the inaugural prize in 2001 for the hybrid poetry and prose collection\u00a0Men in the Off Hours.\u00a0She also became the first woman to win Britain\u2019s T.S. Eliot Prize in 2001 for\u00a0The Beauty of the Husband,\u00a0\u201ca fictional essay in 29 tangos.\u201d<\/p>\n Other honours include MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, the Governor General\u2019s Award for English-language poetry and Spain\u2019s Princess of Asturias Award for Literature. In 2005, she was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada.<\/p>\n Alongside her original work, Carson never stopped translating. In her 2002 translation If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, she digs into the gaps in the ancient poet\u2019s surviving works, treating what was lost as part of the text.<\/p>\n Carson has also kept a foot in the classroom, teaching at universities in the United States and Canada.<\/p>\n Wherever her career has taken her, Carson\u2019s alma mater has never felt far. Walking around campus in 2001, she told U of T Magazine:\u00a0\u201cThere are so many footprints on these streets, I\u2019m surprised they\u2019re not really there.\u201d<\/p>\n Carson will be awarded the Nobel at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10. The prize comes with 12 million Swedish kronor, a gold medal and a diploma.<\/p>\n She told\u00a0prize organizers<\/a> she\u2019s thinking of ways to give the money away, noting that she\u2019s a supporter of Doctors Without Borders. Asked if she had any advice for writers, Carson was characteristically cryptic, refusing to provide easy answers. \u201cStart in the middle. It\u2019s the only rule I have,\u201d she said. \u201cWhatever you take that to mean.\u201d<\/p>\n Carson joins several members of the U of T community who have won the award over the years.<\/p>\n Geoffrey Hinton, a\u00a0U of T\u00a0University Professor<\/a>\u00a0emeritus,\u00a0was one of two researchers awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics<\/a>\u00a0for foundational discoveries and inventions in the field of artificial intelligence that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.<\/p>\n John Polanyi, also a University Professor emeritus,\u00a0was one of three winners of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry\u00a0for the development of the new field of reaction dynamics.\u00a0In 1923, Sir Frederick Banting\u00a0and\u00a0J.J.R. Macleod\u00a0won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work with\u00a0Charles Best to isolate insulin.<\/p>\n Other members of the U of T community, including several\u00a0alumni, have received or been associated with the international honour over the years.<\/p>\n Oliver Smithies, a past professor at U of T,\u00a0was a joint winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the \u201cprinciples for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells.\u201d<\/p>\n Also in 2007, Professor\u00a0Robert Jefferies\u00a0shared in the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in which he was a key Canadian representative as an international leader in Arctic science and global change biology.<\/p>\n In 1999,\u00a0U of T Professor\u00a0James Orbinski\u00a0accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Doctors Without Borders, recognized for its humanitarian work.<\/p>\n Similarly, anti-nuclear activist and U of T alumna\u00a0Setsuko Thurlow\u00a0accepted the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize in Norway on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).<\/p>\n In 2001,\u00a0Michael Spence, an alumnus of the University of Toronto Schools,\u00a0was one of three winners of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his contributions to analyses of markets with asymmetric information.\u00a0<\/p>\n Bertram Brockhouse, who completed two degrees at U of T, was a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1994 for the development of neutron scattering techniques for studies of condensed matter.\u00a0<\/p>\n Arthur Schawlow, an alumnus, was one of three winners of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution to the development of laser spectroscopy.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 1998, U of T alumnus\u00a0Walter Kohn\u00a0was a co-winner of the\u00a0Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of density-functional theory.<\/p>\n Former Prime Minister\u00a0Lester B. Pearson, who received a bachelor\u2019s degree from U of T, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957.<\/p>\n With files from U of T News staff<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anne Carson, who\u00a0honed her mastery of the classics at the University of Toronto before giving them new life…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":925638,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194291],"tags":[49,48,3302],"class_list":["post-925637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-toronto","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-toronto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=925637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925637\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/925638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=925637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=925637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=925637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}