Anne Carson wins 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature has gone to Anne Carson, the Canadian poet and essayist, the Swedish Academy has announced.

The academy praised her "bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature". Oeuvre just means a writer's whole body of work. The Nobel is given for a lifetime of writing, not a single book. The prize comes with 12 million Swedish kronor, about £900,000.

Ingrid Carlberg, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said she phoned Carson shortly before the announcement. "She had time to tell me that she is, for the moment, in Iceland, where she is listening to the wind," Carlberg said. "She was taken by surprise but very happy. I could hear that in her voice."

Carson was born in Toronto in 1950. Her work moves freely between poetry, prose and translation, and draws heavily on the literature and myths of ancient Greece. She has worked as a professor of classics at several institutions, including Princeton, New York University and McGill University in Montreal. She is the 19th woman among 123 literature laureates.

Her first book, Eros the Bittersweet, came out in 1986. It mixed literary criticism with a look at desire and the ancient Greek tradition.

Her best-known work is Autobiography of Red, a 1998 novel in verse. It takes its inspiration from the fragments left by the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus. The book retells the myth of Geryon, the red-winged monster killed by Herakles, as the story of a modern teenage boy dealing with heartbreak and desire.

In 2001, she became the first woman to win the TS Eliot prize, for The Beauty of the Husband. She has also received Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. Susan Sontag once said of her: "She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote. If there's a magazine that has something of hers in it, I buy it automatically."

Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature, said her writing had "broken away from lyrical poetry bound to the narrative self and inspired new forms of contemporary literature". He added: "This method of writing leads to playful and ironic works that move not only between classical and modern poetry but also between different genres and artforms."

Carson's books take many shapes. Men in the Off Hours mixed verse essays, poems, epitaphs and prose about artists and historical figures, and won the inaugural Griffin poetry prize in 2001. Decreation brought together poetry, essays and an opera. Nox, published in 2010, is an accordion-fold box holding a reproduction of a notebook she made after her brother's death. Later works include Red Doc> and Float.

In a Guardian review of Red Doc>, Sarah Crown wrote that engaging so originally with a story first told more than 3,000 years ago "is astonishing", and that Carson's ambition was matched by how completely it was achieved.

The academy said almost all her work centres on "the intersection between the philologist's obsession with words and the poet's desire for new meaning". A philologist studies language and its history. It added that Carson saw the etymology, or origin, of words as "the starting point for all her work".

Asked in an interview why she keeps changing form, Carson said: "Boredom I guess. There is a restlessness. There are a lot of forms to try." In a 2018 interview she admitted the approach has risks. "[My work] does fall apart a lot," she said. "It gets just too weird for anyone to care about reading, or else it gets diluted into a sort of parody of itself."

Carson has mostly kept her private life out of interviews. In an August 2024 article for the London Review of Books, however, she said she had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

The literature prize has been awarded on 118 previous occasions since 1901. Recent winners include Annie Ernaux, Bob Dylan, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Louise Glück, Peter Handke and Olga Tokarczuk. Last year's winner was the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai.

Carson, 76, will receive her medal and diploma at a ceremony in Stockholm in December.