The announcement

The Swedish Academy named Anne Carson the 2026 Nobel laureate in literature on 9 October, citing her "bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature." Carson is a poet, essayist and translator, born in Toronto and aged 76. The academy said she was in Iceland listening to the wind when it reached her by telephone. The award is worth about one million euros, and bookmakers had made her a favourite, sharing top odds with Can Xue, a Chinese novelist.

Ingrid Carlberg, quoted by AP, said the news came as a big surprise to Carson.

She got quite a surprise.

Carson is the second Canadian to win the prize, after Alice Munro in 2013.

Carson's first reaction

Carson told Iceland's public broadcaster RUV that "I think they're all crazy," and she described the conversation with the academy as rather choppy. She added that the academy had the usual questions and that she had no answers.

They have the usual questions, and I don't have answers.

Asked how the prize would change her book sales, she replied:

They'll put a sticker on the cover of my book. Stickers help.

Carson said she is looking for ways to donate the money. She mentioned a friend who needs a house and her habit of giving to Médecins Sans Frontières.

Work and themes

The first of her roughly 30 books was published in 1986. The Economist describes Autobiography of Red, published in 1998, as a novel in verse that recasts Heracles's battle with Geryon as a coming-of-age gay love story, with Geryon as a rebellious teenage boy. Her translation Antigonick reworks Sophocles's tragedy, and her series inspired by fragments of Sappho's poems is titled "If not, Winter". The Glass Essay, a long poem in Glass, Irony and God (1995), tries to make sense of a break-up, and Deutsche Welle reports that it also reflects on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.

Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel Committee, described her work when he introduced her as the winner:

Almost all her literary work centres on the meeting between a philologist's obsession with words and a poet's desire to find new meaning.

Recognition

Carson received the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2001 for The Beauty of the Husband, becoming the first woman to win that British prize, according to NDR. She has also held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, and she is a professor of classical philology who has taught at universities in Canada and the United States. NDR literary expert Jan Ehlert described her as a scholar in the best sense and said:

It is not always easy to read, and the typography can be demanding, since sentences, words and images often appear on the page in seemingly random arrangements. But if you engage with it and enjoy following large arcs of thought, there is hardly a better author than Anne Carson.

Alice Munro's book sales soared after she won in 2013, according to AP.