The 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to Canadian author Anne Carson

Canadian author Anne Carson received the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday October 8. The poet was awarded “for her bold and inventive work which, in a playful dialogue with classical tradition, created new forms for contemporary literature,” said Ingrid Carlberg, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy. She becomes the 19th woman to win the award.

Anne Carson heard the good news while she was in Iceland “listening to the wind.” She is particularly known for Nox, an “unforgettable work”, published in 2010 in memory of her brother Michael, who mysteriously disappeared before dying in Denmark in 2000, explains the Nobel Academy. The work unfolds like a single long continuous sheet of several meters.

Among his works available in French, let us cite Autobiographie du rouge (L'arche), Men in their lost hours (L'arche) and Glass, irony and God (Corti).

The writer was born on June 21, 1950 in Toronto, Canada. She occupies a unique territory: poet, essayist, translator and Hellenist, she has built a body of work where traditional categories tend to dissolve; a book can start from Greek myth, take the form of an essay and suddenly shift into poetry, autobiographical story or meditation on desire. “Almost all of her literary work revolves around the meeting between the philologist's obsession with words and the poet's desire to create new meanings,” says the Nobel committee.

“Throughout her career, she reconciled poetic writing with translation and teaching activities in various universities,” we can still read on the Nobel Prize website. She published her doctoral thesis in classics entitled Odi et Amo Ergo Sum in 1981. Her translations from classical Greek can be considered works in their own right. These include his interpretation of fragments of Sappho's poems, If Not, Winter (2002), as well as tragedies such as Sophocles' Electra (2001) and Antigone (2015), and Euripides' The Bacchae (2015).