According to information in Iceland's largest newspaper Morgunblaðið, Anne Carson was granted Icelandic citizenship in 2022. The newspaper describes it as Iceland receiving its second Nobel Prize in literature with Carson, after the award to Halldór Laxness in 1955.
Anne Carson herself states in an interview in The Paris Review that she and her husband have spent parts of the year in Iceland since 2008. She conducts the Zoom interview with The Paris Review in the apartment in the Icelandic capital Reykjavik, where the living room, which is painted brick red, is decorated with a work by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson.
Through the windows of her apartment in Reykjavik, Anne Carson can see both the Atlantic Ocean and the Icelandic tundra, a barrenness she prefers to the condensed North American landscape. "America seems so overcrowded with vegetation," says Carson. "Trees everywhere, plants just everywhere, flowers. Here it's just empty. There's lava, there's ocean. Empty space."
The Icelandic television channel Rúv asked Anne Carson on Thursday how the association with other Icelandic poets influenced her creation.
- They are all fantastic people, replies Carson. Almost everyone we meet is a poet, or says they are. It's a very vivid scene.
She tells us that she has read Halldór Laxness.
- He's cool, she says.
In 2023, Anne Carson received the Icelandic Vigdis Prize, which goes to a person who has made "significant contributions to the development of language, culture and translation".
The Swedish translator Lars-Håkan Svensson met Anne Carson last spring when the Turteatern in Stockholm staged her play "Norma Jeane Baker av Troja". They then talked about Iceland.
- It was quite superficial, but we agreed that it is very cold there. That was about as far as we got.
How have you noticed Anne Carson's connection to Iceland in her work?
- In her latest book there is a text in which Icelanders appear and I suspect that it takes place in Iceland during a film shoot, which is quite wild and unclear in outline.
Volcanoes, there are about 130 in Iceland, reappear in Anne Carson's work.
In 2021, she could follow the eruption of Fagradsfjall with her own eyes after 800 years of volcanic rest on the Reykjanes peninsula. It resulted in 32 drawings and paintings, which have been collected in a work with the title "When you're away time is different".
"Red Autobiography" - Carson's most famous novel - has been described as a "volcanic journey into the soul of a winged, red monster".
Swimming and bathing – important to Icelanders in general – is also important to Anne Carson. In The Paris Review, she describes swimming as an integral part of her own writing process.
"It keeps me from being gloomy and grumpy," Carson says of swimming. "Sometimes I think when I'm in the pool. Most of the time, it's not a good idea. The ideas you get in the pool are like dream ideas - you come up with a sentence that answers every question you've ever had about reality, you get up giddy and write it down, and in the morning it says 'we should buy bananas' or something completely irrelevant."
But, says Anne Carson, "some people simply need to be near water".
When it became clear that Carson had received this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, Icelandic President Halla Tómasdóttir posted a clip of an interview with Carson adorned with emojis that signaled gratitude and love for books.
