Anne Carson, the 76-year-old Canadian writer and artist who won the Nobel Prize for literature Thursday, has always been unapologetically — and quietly — herself, friends and admirers say.
Sometimes, that has meant not being fully recognized or understood in her own country.
Carson’s work defies genre, hopping from prose to poetry to essay — sometimes within the same piece. It features imagined conversations between ancient classics figures and modern celebrities, poetry about love and loss and musings on people’s (and her own) idiosyncracies.
Carson is also a renowned scholar and translator of Ancient Greek, known for her revival of Sappho’s fragments, notably in her book If Not Winter.
International awards recognized Carson’s talent early on. Her first book, 1984’s Canicula di Anna, won the Quarterly Review of Literature’s Betty Colladay Award. In 1996, she won the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
Two years later, she was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and, in 2000, a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the “Genius Grant.”
But the lack of Canadian recognition didn’t appear to bother her.
“I like to live behind the back of following,” she told The Globe and Mail in 2000.
“Early in her career, a lot of people didn’t get it or want to get it,” said Lucille Friesen-King Edwards, who along with her then-husband co-founded The Word, a Montreal bookstore that Carson frequented when she taught at McGill University from the late 1980s to early 2000s.
“She’s very much herself. She does what she does.”
Canada catches up
Canada eventually caught up, awarding Carson the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize several times, as well as the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry.
But her work, known for its depth and playfulness with words, punctuation and layout, has attracted both young readers and elder intelligentsia alike — an “if you know, you know” kind of status.
Friesen-King Edwards’s favourite work of Carson’s is The Beauty of the Husband, an examination of a failed marriage that won the author the UK.’s T.S. Eliot Prize in 2001.
Adrian King Edwards, left, and Lucille Friesen-King Edwards co-founded The Word bookstore in Montreal, where Anne Carson used to visit when she taught at McGill University. (Submitted by The Word Bookstore)
Her ex-husband and bookstore co-founder, Adrian King Edwards, pointed out that most of Carson’s books do not feature a biography of the writer, only a simple sentence: “Anne Carson lives in Canada.”
Still, her books, enigmatic as they may be, rarely last a few hours on the shelves before being picked up by customers, he says.
“On the one hand, her work feels a little niche, but on the other hand, so many people connect with it,” said the couple’s son, Brendan Edwards.
From poetry to paint and theatre
Carson has illustrated several of her book covers herself, namely a vivid black and red volcano on Glass, Irony and God, and a hand-drawn, animal-like figure on the more recent Wrong Norma.
She has also written plays and art performances. Her translation of Antigone, Sophocles’s classic fifth-century BCE tragedy, featured Academy Award-winning French actress Juliette Binoche starring in the titular role and Belgium’s Ivo van Hove as director.
Will Aitken, a Montreal writer and Carson’s close friend, wrote a book about his experience witnessing the making of the play, which had a profound impact on him.
“This had a lot to do with Anne herself, because she translated this ancient classic and did it in vernacular English,” Aitken told CBC while on holiday in Sarajevo.
“She knows how to make things immediate. And she knows how to dive into almost anything and find the core, the heart of emotion and expresses that.”
Will Aitken is the Montreal-based author of Antigone Undone, a book about his experience witnessing the making of the play. (Gerald L’Ecuyer/University of Regina Press)
Similarly, Carson has imagined scenarios featuring Ancient Greek or Roman poets and characters conversing colloquially with each other or with present-day celebrities, expressing having modern-day concerns and anxieties.
In her work Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, she stages conversations between Helen of Troy, Helen of Sparta, Marilyn Monroe and Norma Jeane Baker, Monroe’s birth name.
“She’s thought so hard about time, and it’s as if she can walk through it,” said Victoria Wohl, a classics professor at the University of Toronto, who says Carson has been an inspiration and regularly teaches her translations.
Love, longing, language
Wohl, too, believes Carson may have been underappreciated as a giant of Canadian literature — though she noted that perhaps winning the world’s most distinguished literary award could change that.
She said she first encountered Carson’s work when she read Eros: The Bittersweet as a graduate student in the 1990s. The book, which explores desire through classical philosophy and literature, is still widely read despite being among the author’s more academic works.
“She’s very interested in pothos, which is the love of longing and lack,” said Wohl. “And these gaps between people, between words, between understandings.”
Wohl said Carson’s writing was a departure from other classics scholars, and inspired her to write differently in her own career.
Victoria Wohl is a professor of classical studies at the University of Toronto and regularly incorporates Anne Carson’s ancient Greek translations in her teaching. (Submitted by the University of Toronto)
In real life, Wohl said, Carson is “ethereal and otherworldly, and you can sense the brilliance and creativity.”
Elizabeth Harvey, a professor emeritus at University of Toronto who is writing a book about the writer, added another perspective: Carson can be disarmingly deadpan, she says, putting audiences “in stitches” when she speaks in public.
The poet showed a glimpse of that sense of humour in a response to the Globe and Mail on Thursday, when the newspaper sought her reaction to winning the Nobel.
Carson — who was in Iceland, where she spends much of her time with her husband, Robert Currie — emailed back a one-word reply: “YIKES!!”
Anne Carson was in Iceland ‘listening to the wind’ when the Swedish Academy permanent secretary reached her to discuss the Canadian author’s selection as the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.
‘Polite, but wrong’
Speaking to the Paris Review in 2024, Carson shared some of the inspiration for the title of her book, Wrong Norma.
“When people ask me, ‘How are Canadians different from Americans?’ I say, ‘Canadians have one characteristic: they’re polite, but wrong.’ All the time, polite but wrong,” she said.
She is the third Canadian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, and her win comes at a time when the country’s entertainment offerings are piquing the world’s curiosity and broadening its own horizons.
Anne Carson poses at the National Book Critics Circle Awards in New York in March 1999. (Stephen Chernin/Canadian Press)
Prime Minister Mark Carney — who himself has attracted international attention since being sworn in last year — congratulated Carson in a social media post Thursday, applauding her “wit, imagination and a style entirely her own.”
Aitken, her close friend, quipped: “Carney and Anne together have raised the Canadian profile immensely.”
She continues to publish pieces regularly in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books, where she has recently written about living with Parkinson’s disease.
“A symptom particularly mortifying to me was that my handwriting disintegrated,” Carson wrote.
As for the future, Carson is already working on her next book, according to Harvey. Aitken noted that she is always occupied — at her home, she uses three different desks, he said, often working on several pieces of art and writing simultaneously.
She has also written about swimming, comparing it to seeking beauty. Aitken recalled a vacation the pair took in Cape Cod decades ago, when his friend would wake up at 5 a.m. every morning to swim in the bay and then write until lunchtime.
“She’s constantly overflowing with ideas and concepts and metaphors, and, you know, needs to express them and needs to get them out there.”
