STOCKHOLM — Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for "bold and inventive" works that fuse the classical and the modern and blur the boundaries of poetry and prose.
The Toronto-born Carson, 76, draws on themes from classical Greek and Roman literature, modern influences and personal experience for genre-blending works that have ranged from translations of ancient Greek poets to collaborations with dancers and musicians, including Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed.
The Swedish Academy that awards the prize said she won “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
The permanent secretary of the academy said the author was in Iceland “listening to the wind” when the academy reached her to notify her of the honor.
“She was very taken by surprise,” Ingrid Carlberg said.
Asked how she felt about the award, Carson told the Icelandic public broadcaster RUV: “I think they’re all crazy.” She described the conversation with the academy as “rather halting.”
“They have the usual questions, and I have no answers,” she said.
She said poetry is “probably more useful than prose right now because it’s faster, and everybody is in a hurry. So basically I think it’s good because it’s brief. Except Homer. Homer’s not brief.”
Carson is among the more high-profile recent winners of the literature Nobel, which often honors authors little known outside of the literary world and is sometimes criticized for valuing literary experimentation over the ability to connect with a broad readership.
However, the prize can also introduce readers to writers and works beyond their own languages or reading habits.
Asked how the prize would change her sales, she said: “I’ll get a sticker on the front of my book. Stickers help.”
Works range from classical Greek translations to poetry
Carson's books include “Eros the Bittersweet,” a look at the pleasure and pain of desire in ancient Greek literature, the verse novel “Autobiography of Red,” as well as “Men in the Off Hours,” a collection of poetry and prose that won Canada’s Griffin Prize for poetry in 2001, and “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy,” which compares Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy.
“Autobiography of Red,” which reimagined the myth of Hercules and the monster Geryon as a love story, has sold nearly 100,000 copies in the U.S. alone, according to a spokesman for Alfred A. Knopf, which published the book in 1998.
She also has translated works of classical Greek literature that, the academy said, “may be regarded as independent works in their own right.” They include “If Not, Winter,” based on poem fragments by Sappho, Sophocles’ tragic plays “Electra” and "Antigone” and Euripides’ “Bakkhai.”
“Almost all her literary production has centered upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning,” said Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel Literature Committee.
Carson’s wide-ranging influences, from the ancient Greeks to John Keats, Virginia Woolf and Emily Bronte, lead "to playful and ironic works that move not only between classical and modern poetry but also between different genres and art forms,” Olsson said.
Carson blends genres and styles, offering “different voices that play off against each other,” he added.
“Economy of the Unlost,” from 1999, sets ancient Greek poet Simonides of Keos against 20th-century poet Paul Celan, he said, while “Men in the Off Hours,” published in 2000, “aligns the historian Thucydides with Virginia Woolf.”
Carson, who won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2000, is the first Canadian Nobel literature winner since Alice Munro in 2013.
“With wit, imagination, and a style entirely her own," Carson "has reimagined the classics. She has brought ancient stories to new audiences and transformed the way we think about literature,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney posted on social media.
Carson wrote about her own life and struggles
Carson has taught classics at several North American universities and has lived in Iceland, where she and her husband, Robert Currie, were granted citizenship in 2022.
She also has drawn on her own life for works such as “Nox,” which was published in 2010 and dealt with the decades-long absence and then death of her brother Michael.
Olsson called it “a creation as sculptural as it is literary, an epitaph in the form of a box containing an accordion-fold-out of pictures, letters and other written texts dedicated to her dead brother.” It also includes Carson’s translation of an elegy by the Roman poet Catullus for his own brother.
Among her most recent work is “Wrong Norma,” a wide-ranging 2024 collection of pieces from publications including The Paris Review and The New Yorker, accompanied by Carson’s hand-drawn illustrations.
Also that year, Carson wrote in the London Review of Books about being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She said a “particularly mortifying" symptom was that her handwriting “disintegrated.”
“Hard to describe or explain the shame of bad handwriting,” she said. “Bad handwriting is ugly. Also it is inauthentic. In the sense it is not you.”
The prize was announced in Stockholm. Carson did not immediately respond to emails from The Associated Press.
Friday to bring peace prize winner
Three science awards were announced earlier this week. The Nobel for medicine went to three scientists whose work led to a tool that uses light to help unravel how the brain works. The physics award recognized a scientist's efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos. The chemistry prize recognized two scientists for untangling mysterious mirror images in molecules, a discovery that has been used to develop countless drugs.
This week ends with Friday's peace prize. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced Monday.
The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million) per prize.
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Italie reported from New York and Lawless reported from London. Stefanie Dazio in Berlin contributed to this report.
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