'It's Crazy': Poet Anne Carson Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature

The 76-year-old Canadian classicist who remakes Greek myths won for "bold and inventive" work, the Swedish Academy said.

Anne Carson, the Canadian poet, was in Iceland listening to the wind when the Swedish Academy reached her, according to the academy's top official. That was about all she had time to say.

Carson, 76, won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, Al Jazeera reported. The academy honored her "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature," it said in a statement. Put plainly, the Nobel just went to a classics professor who's spent a career talking back to ancient Greece.

She doesn't fit on one shelf, and that's the point of the citation. Her more than 20 books blur poetry and fiction, and some have been staged as plays. "The Beauty of the Husband" tells the story of a doomed marriage as one book-length poem. Her 2021 "The Trojan Women" turned Euripides into a graphic book that talks like right now.

The academy's case starts with single words. It said nearly everything she's written lives where a philologist's fixation on language meets a poet's hunger for fresh meaning, that she has called etymology the starting point of her work, and that her translations from Classical Greek can stand as works of their own.

The reaction was loud for a poet. Her name hit No. 1 on Bluesky's trending list and sixth on Google Trends in California, and it showed up on Hacker News, too. Not bad for someone who writes book-length poems.

The prize is worth 12 million Swedish crowns, and she follows Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, last year's laureate. Born in Toronto, Carson also spends time in Iceland and holds citizenship there.

Ingrid Carlberg, the academy's permanent secretary, said Carson was very surprised. Carson's own first verdict, given to the Icelandic broadcaster RÚV, was shorter: "Crazy. I think they're all crazy … Well, you know, it's crazy."

Source: ktla.com.

Source: aljazeera.com, retrieved October 8, 2026.