GUWAHATI: Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature for her distinctive body of work that blends poetry, fiction, scholarship and classical literature.
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The Nobel Prize committee selected Carson, 76, “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.
Born in Toronto in 1950, Carson is known for works that move between poetry, prose and translation, with much of her writing drawing on the literature and mythology of ancient Greece.
Her first book, Eros the Bittersweet, was published in 1986. The work combined literary criticism with an exploration of desire and the ancient Greek literary tradition.
Carson’s best-known work, Autobiography of Red, was published in 1998 as a novel in verse. Inspired by fragments of the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus, it reimagines the myth of Geryon, the red-winged monster killed by Herakles, through the story of a modern teenage boy dealing with heartbreak and desire.
Her other notable works include The Glass Essay (1995), The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001) and Nox (2010), which she wrote in memory of her brother Michael.
Her later works include Float (2016) and Wrong Norma (2024). Carson has also worked across literature, visual art, theatre and opera, continuing to experiment with conventional literary forms.
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.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded for a lifetime body of work and is regarded as one of the most prestigious honours in global literature. The winner receives 12 million Swedish kronor, equivalent to around £900,000 or $1.2 million.
The literature prize 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 dystopian and avant-garde writing.
Carson will formally receive the Nobel medal and diploma at a ceremony in Stockholm in December.
