Nobel Prize in Literature for Anne Carson, poet of the classics

The Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Swedish Academy awarded the prize to Carson "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature".

She is the second Canadian writer to win the prize, after the short story writer Alice Munro in 2013.

"Listening to the wind"

Ingrid Carlberg, the Academy's permanent secretary, said Carson had been surprised by the news. "She is for the moment in Iceland, where she's listening to the wind," she said.

Carson, 76, was born in Toronto and has held Icelandic citizenship since 2022.

The philologist and the poet

Carson is a classicist as well as a poet, and her work grows out of ancient Greek literature. The Academy said: "Almost all her literary production has centred upon the intersection between the philologist's obsession with words and the poet's desire for new meaning."

She has spent much of her working life as a university teacher of classics, in Canada and the United States, and her poems often begin with a fragment of an ancient text, a footnote or a dictionary entry, which she then turns into something strikingly modern and personal.

Her books mix verse, prose, dialogue, essay and translation in ways that are hard to classify. She has written opera libretti and literary criticism, and her translations of Greek poets and playwrights, including Sappho and the tragedians, are widely read and performed.

Where to start

• Autobiography of Red (1998): a novel in verse that retells an ancient Greek myth as a story about a young man growing up and falling in love. It is her best-known book.
• Eros the Bittersweet (1986): her first book, an essay on desire in Greek poetry.
• If Not, Winter (2002): her translation of the surviving fragments of Sappho.
• Nox (2010): an elegy for her brother, made as a folded book in a box.
• Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019): a version of the Helen of Troy story, told through Marilyn Monroe.

A favourite

Carson had been one of the favourites with the bookmakers, sharing the best odds of 10 to 1 with the Chinese novelist Can Xue. The Nobel Committee is chaired by the critic and literary historian Anders Olsson.

The prize

The prize is worth 12 million Swedish kronor. Carson will receive her medal at the ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December.

The literature prize is the fourth of this year's Nobel Prizes, after medicine, physics and chemistry. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced in Oslo on Friday, and the prize in economic sciences on Monday.

Birmingham's readers

Readers in Birmingham can borrow Carson's books through the city's libraries, including the Library of Birmingham on Centenary Square. Her work is also often taught on university literature and classics courses in the city.