Canadian Anne Carson awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded Thursday to Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.

Carson, 76, was recognized for “her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new ‌forms for contemporary literature,” the award-giving body said.

The academy said Carson was surprised by the honour, who was in Iceland “listening to the wind” when they made contact with her.

‘The Glass Essay’ in ‘Glass, Irony, and God’ (1995), which demonstrates the potential of the long poem where genre boundaries are seen to blur.

The same decade saw the publication of another work, often heralded as Carson’s greatest, entitled ‘Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse’ (1998). This demonstrates her eminent ability to actualise the classical literary tradition. 

Carson has won a host of literary awards in the past. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy — which mixes the life of Marilyn Monroe with stories of Helen of Troy in Euripides’s play Helen — was awarded a 2020 Governor General Award in poetry.

The following year, she received a career achievement award from the PEN America Literary Awards, who called her a “visionary, sui generis writer,” with the judges announcing her honour in the form of a poem.

The Toronto native’s first book of poetry Canicula di Anna was published in 1984, her reputation in Canada and beyond burnished two years later with the publication of her first collection of essays, Eros the Bittersweet.

Through the years she has also been known for translating Greek and Latin works, as well as pieces adapted for operas, including We Need to Talk and H of H Playbook.

“Making a poem is making an object,” she has previously told CBC’s Writers & Company with Eleanor Wachtel. “I always thought of them more as drawings than as texts, but drawings that are also physically enterable through the fact of language.”

In 2002, she became the first woman to win Britain’s T.S. Eliot Prize for The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos.

Two years ago, in a London Review of Books essay, Carson revealed that she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Toni Morrison and V.S. Naipaul are among the notable writers to receive the award since its inception in 1901. Saul Bellow (1976) and Alice Munro (2013) are the previous Canadian-born writers to be awarded the prize, though Bellow moved to the U.S. as a child and launched his career there.

The Nobel Peace Price will be announced on Friday, with the Nobel’s economics prize following on Monday. The Nobel prizes are presented to the laureates on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.

Prize winners this year receive 12 million Swedish ‌crowns ($1.7 million Cdn).

Nobel, the Swedish chemist and entrepreneur, dictated in his will that the bulk of his estate should be used to fund “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.”