Anne Carson wins Nobel prize in literature 2026

The Swedish Academy has awarded the 2026 Nobel prize in literature to Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson. The academy cited her bold and inventive body of work that engages playfully with classical tradition and creates new forms for contemporary literature. Carson, 76, will receive the medal and diploma at a ceremony in Stockholm in December.

Born in Toronto in 1950, Carson's work moves fluidly between poetry, prose, and translation, often drawing on ancient Greek literature and mythology. Her first book, Eros the Bittersweet, appeared in 1986, blending literary criticism with an exploration of desire and the Greek tradition. She is perhaps best known for Autobiography of Red, a 1998 novel in verse inspired by the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus, which reimagines the myth of Geryon as a modern teenage boy's story of heartbreak and desire.

In 2001, Carson became the first woman to win the TS Eliot prize, for her collection The Beauty of the Husband. She has also received Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. Fellow writer Susan Sontag once said she would read anything Carson wrote and would automatically buy any magazine containing her work.

Carson's books have taken widely varied forms. Men in the Off Hours, which mixed verse essays, poems, epitaphs, and prose about artists and historical figures, won the inaugural Griffin poetry prize in 2001. Decreation brought together poetry, essays, and an opera, while Nox, published in 2010, is an accordion-fold box containing a reproduction of a notebook Carson made after her brother's death. Her later works include Red Doc> and Float.

The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded 118 times since 1901. Recent laureates include Annie Ernaux, Bob Dylan, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Louise Glück, Peter Handke, and Olga Tokarczuk. Last year's recipient was Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, known for his dystopic and avant-garde writing.