It's an overcast, rainy Friday in Reykjavik and Anne Carson has asked us to meet her at Mjölnir – a boxing gym on the outskirts of the city.
Almost exactly one day after she was announced as this year's Nobel laureate in literature, the poet slips out into the reception in boxing gloves.
She doesn't take them off.
- They make me feel like a different person, she says and sits down at one of the rustic wooden tables. The thoughts should probably go to a Viking hall. On the wall behind us hangs a large poster representing the founder of the gym: the well-known Icelandic MMA practitioner Gunnar Nelson.
How did we end up here anyway?
Anne Carson's husband, the artist Thomas Currie, explains: Anne is looking for a gym where she can get exercise adapted to her Parkinson's. Now the spouses are visiting Mjölnir. The facility is only a few kilometers from their house down by the sea, so it would be a practical solution.
Also, Anne Carson likes boxing. She has done that for a long time. The gloves do something to her. It's hard to put your finger on what.
- They make me feel aggressive, she says, but quickly corrects herself:
- No, not aggressive. Exactly. To hit a good shot, you have to hit the opponent in exactly the right place. A "bang" is not enough.
You like to swim too. Do you swim in the sea all year round?
- No, but here in Iceland you can always swim outdoors, in the hot springs. It's wonderful. In Michigan, I mostly swim at the local YMCA pool.
Iceland makes me think of music. Do you listen to music while you write?
- No, never. I never remember to turn it on.
The first time Anne Carson and Thomas Currie visited Iceland was in 2008, when they participated in an art project in the small town of Stykkishólmur on the island's northwest coast. They were struck by the nature, the stillness, the people and the volcanoes that have long been part of Anne Carson's imagery. Some time later they bought an apartment in Reykjavik and now they have been Icelandic citizens for a couple of years. But in the summers, they leave the island and the hordes of tourists, Currie says - then they'd rather be in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Anne Carson thus divides her time between Iceland and the United States, even though she originally comes from Canada. She was born in Toronto in 1950. The father was a bank clerk, the mother a housewife, and the family moved often. The young Anne found solace in literature, in Greek and the novels of Oscar Wilde, but did not enjoy writing herself.
- I wasn't interested in writing when I was little, she remembers. That I started with it was a coincidence. I didn't want to be a writer. I just wanted to draw pictures. But eventually I started putting captions on the pictures. Then the headlines got longer. In the end they turned into small lectures. And because people liked them, I kept doing it.
That her writing is random, she has been aware of before. In the first interview she did after she was presented as this year's literature prize winner, she described her writing as "unintentional".
I ask her to elaborate. She answers briefly but to the point, as she does to all questions. The boxing gloves remain on. Sometimes she smiles, sometimes she looks thoughtful.
- I never wanted to talk. I wanted to create images. But people... How do I put this? People seem to need language. They are not satisfied with an image.
Would you settle for a picture?
- I did it when I was seven years old. But I learned to admire the language as something in itself.
After university studies in ancient languages - something she would later become a professor of - Anne Carson debuted in 1986 with the tone-setting book of essays "Eros the Bittersweet", a revision of her dissertation from 1981. Based on how the Greek poet Sappho describes love as something bittersweet, she explores the relationship between desire and pain and how love arises in the distance between the lovers.
Today, she has published a large number of texts on widely different subjects, in widely different genres that often merge: poetry, essay, lectures, performance, translations of ancient poems and dramas, a personal elegy for a dead brother.
Among her better-known books are the poetry collection "Makens søndet. En fictive essay i 29 tangos" (2001, in Swedish 2012) and "Red autobiography" (1998, in Swedish 2009) - a verse novel in which Anne Carson starts from Stesichoro's poem about the myth of Herakles but imagines the hero and the monster he is supposed to kill, Geryon, as a toxic contemporary love couple.
She often works like this: letting the protagonists of myths or historical events and people step forward in new, unexpected and more modern contexts. Marilyn Monroe in Troy. Lazarus with a film camera. It can seem wrong, disorienting, contradictory - and that's the point.
In an essay entitled "Essä om det ja thinkin pa most", from the text collection "Lediga män" (2000, in Swedish 2020), she writes that mistakes make the unexpected possible. In an interview with the Paris Review, she paraphrases Simone Weil when she says that contradictions are a useful mental process that frees the mind.
And in his latest book "Fel Norma", published in English in 2024 and in Swedish very recently, there is much that is distorted.
- Currie and I used to teach a university course called "Ego circus", says Anne Carson when I ask why she is fascinated by doing exactly "wrong".
- There we asked the students to look for places in their texts where things go wrong and then use that to open up something that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to access. I think that is what I have done in my own work.
She returns to the error, but also to the unintentional. When she starts writing, she rarely, if ever, has a clear plan. She has described it as all she does is put a mark on a piece of paper and see what situation arises. Said that creation is like seeing a fox in your backyard and following it.
Several of the texts in "Fel Norma", whose cover is decorated with a fox drawn by Anne Carson herself, seem to have arisen just like that. But there is also a political vein in the book that is not just a coincidence.
Among other things, you write about the fate of refugees. Why?
- I guess I think an artist should take responsibility for the world he lives in. I don't have a broad enough knowledge of world politics or political theory to be able to say anything particularly meaningful about the world being in such chaos, but it's good to address the problem anyway, and draw the readers into it.
The push notifications on our cell phones have just told us that the jurist Navi Pillay, known for his work on international law and former chairman of the panel that singled out Israel as responsible for genocide, has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.
- It is an example of something that deserves attention and emphasis, says Anne Carson. If I can do that, for example in a poem, maybe it would be good for the world.
In an interview with the Review of Iceland from 2022, she states that she is not really very theoretical herself – she cannot understand things by looking at them from the outside, she has to understand them from the inside.
But how do you get inside?
- With willpower. You simply keep thinking until you get past the outer layers. It's like trying to sink to the bottom of the pool by sheer will, which isn't easy. I mean, people think that if you jump in, you'll sink, but that's not the case. You jump in and you float. It's hard to be an artistic swimmer. Are you an artistic swimmer?
No, I think I'm pretty bad at swimming.
- Okay. Getting down to the bottom is one of the hardest things anyway. Both when it comes to swimming and thinking.
Sometimes you are also described as a funny writer. There is obviously a kind of subtle humor in your lyrics. are you funny
- Haha. No. I would like to be funny, I think it helps people. But it's not something you can aspire to be. There is nothing worse than a well thought out joke. There's that accidental thing again. Unintentional humor is so much better.
You have said that you had not been a poet in another life, because you are not a poet in the life you live now. How would you describe what you do yourself?
- The Greek word for it is poiesis and means "to make".
You make words, rather than write them?
- I do things. Sometimes it's drawings.
Is it important for you to continue doing?
- Yes, that's how I live in the world.
The choice of Anne Carson as Nobel laureate was expected, as her name had been in speculation for years. But it can also be seen as a fitting sign of the times. In recent years, popular writers such as Madeleine Miller and Stephen Fry have engaged in variations on what Carson has been busy with since the 80s: breathing new life into the Greek myths, through reinterpretations and imaginations around characters and events. When star director Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of Homer's "Odyssey" premiered in theaters this summer, interest in the myths was given another injection.
Anne Carson has seen the film. She doesn't like it.
Do you want to give me a short movie review?
- No, that would be cruel.
We move on. You are this year's Nobel laureate in literature. How does it make you feel?
- Weird. The only thing I wrote in my diary yesterday was: "I won the Nobel Prize. Strange day." That's all I have to say about the feeling.
Anne Carson has said that she and her husband have plans to give away the prize money of 11 million kroner. They have not yet decided to whom or what.
- It is difficult. To decide, to share, she says.
Will you be going to Stockholm for the award ceremony in December?
- They haven't told me anything about it, when it will be or anything like that. We have a lot of other things that we have to do in December, so we'll see.
